The VonTrapp Family rides through Thailand

One thing I have noticed about international Christian schools is that they like to have these insane "field trips weeks" that are all about learning and growing and serving and stuff like that.  They call them different things, but it's all the same.  At BAICA, it was called Mini-mester, then NICS took over and it became Week Without Walls (WWW) and then I came to ICS where we have SALT trips: serving and learning together.  Here, each grade level does a different trip for three days, and I am thanking my lucky stars that I am a 6th grade homeroom teacher, since we are the only ones that do day trips instead of staying overnight.  Today was Day 1.

Today our team of 7 teachers took our 70ish students to Ancient Siam, a Thai history park just outside of Bangkok.  It has all these replicas of sites important to Thai history and culture, and the park itself is shaped like Thailand. I think the replicas are even placed geographically throughout the park, though I am not really sure about that.  In the past, they have ridden trams around the park with a tour guide. This year, however, we rode bikes.  In the heat and sun.  Except some kids didn't know how to ride a bike, so we needed two teachers to drive golf carts with those kids.  Being the generous person that I am, I agreed to take one for the team and drive a golf cart, which was, of course, the highlight of my day. I have never driven a golf cart before, especially not when I'm trying to stay to the left, and definitely not one with swarms of students on bicycles all around me.  Amazingly, I didn't hit anyone or anything, even the few times I had to throw that baby into reverse.

Even in the cart, I was soaked through by the time we got to lunch, but the kids seemed to have fun (we did a photo scavenger hunt throughout the park) even if they didn't read any of the information or learn much of anything.  They were pretty cute tooling around on their bikes, reminded me just a bit of the scene from The Sound of Music when they ride bikes.  The park map was pretty insane so we spent a great deal of time just being lost, but I think that was the norm for most groups, so I don't feel too bad.  It could be a cool place to come back to with visitors if people are interested in the history and don't have time to go to one of the ancient capitols of Thailand, there were quite a few things I would have liked to see if I weren't keeping tabs on eleven 11 year olds!