Homeschool Field Trip to the Log Cabin Village

I coordinated the first field trip for a small group of homeschooling families at our young church: a trip to Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth. There are only five or six families (that I know of) who homeschool in our church, so I reached out to other homeschoolers I know in order to increase our field trip attendance numbers. What I didn't count on was this family telling that family who invited this other family, and the original count of 20 people I confirmed for swelling to 64. Still, kids get sick, and people just don't show up, so a 20% drop off was very conservative, I thought. I really expected no more than 40-45 people to be at the Village for the tour, but the final head count was 54 people. A successful first field trip, I'd say!

We were split into three groups and were taken through log cabins, told stories of pioneers, shown working primitive tools, handed lye soap and sheep's wool, and shown blacksmithing, corn milling, and candle-making demonstrations. The weather was lovely, the cabins looked beautiful against the fall foliage, and the children were all so well behaved.

Though the trip itself was a whole bunch of fun, the best part is this: on Sunday, when I went to church, a lady called my name. She said she and her family just moved here from Florida, they live 10 miles west of us, and had been trying out churches in another direction. Hers was one of the families who'd been invited to our field trip by a friend of a friend, and she decided after meeting several of us to try out our church. She said she loved it, it was no more of a drive than the churches they'd been checking out, and that we'd see her back there again. I was just looking to get a group rate on a field trip and God used our outing to show someone to their new church home. Awesome!