As expected, the cooking Girl Scouts had a ball on the European jaunt they earned in the Grace Church kitchen. Even the arithmetic is impressive: 2 leaders, 14 girls, 747 flight, 7 countries in 17 days!
According to Betty Klinefelter, leader, the trip was a great success. True, they were stacked up over New York until they missed their Trans-Atlantic plane and had to put down in Amsterdam instead of Paris, where their first hotel awaited them.
The coke expense had been seriously underestimated, because cokes were everywhere forty or fifty cents. It was a real joy as well as a saving to get to Switzerland where milk was available. Meantime, the coke expense could be defrayed by shopping mornings in food markets for bread and cheese or salami and fruit, and staying out of restaurants at noon. Very soon the travelers discovered that the second bun in the famed “continental breakfast” could be buttered and stashed in a handbag to help underwrite the cokes.
The girls were turned away from the Monte Carlo Casino because of their age but managed to swim off the famed Riveria. They climbed the Leaning Tower, tipped their heads back in the Sistine, said Hi to the famous sights, climbed a Swiss mountain and were chased off it, danced to native folk music played by native musicians at Innsbruck, rode the Amsterdam canals, met their former pastor and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Wesley Hager at the Hague, sailed down the Rhine, took a look at Heidelberg and flittered briefly around London.
Because of the way the girls earned their trip (Clarissa Start dubbed it “the Cook’s Tour”), they have had a good deal of publicity. Their summer-job employers held their jobs for them and now school and another round of church dinners have begun again.
The cook-travelers have already decided that next summer they will charter a bus for a trip into the American Southwest with Santa Fe, the Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, and one day in Mexico on the itinerary.
Good going, girls!
Originally published in The Paper, November 1971.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1971_11.pdf, printed page 6.
