Walnut Grove Pinewood Derby

After months of anticipating, weeks of building and practicing, we had our Pinewood Derby for our scouts yesterday.  (which is why I am too tired to doing anything on my list today and am catching my blog up to date instead).  All of that anticipating, building, etc....was done by Gary.  After the practice beta test with the High Priests in October, Gary has been looking forward to making this a great event for our 28 Cub Scouts.  My goal is always to have no Cubs cry during the event.

After some nervous moments and a bit of a delay for Technical Difficulties (poor Gary),  everything slid into place and we were able to run a fast moving pinewood derby.  All cars ran down all four of the tracks in a collection of 4 different heats.  The times were all done by the computer----no fights about stop watches (so nice).  The computer kept track of the times and the calculated the winners at the end.  We had decided to not give awards to the individual finishers but to the den with the fastest total times.  We did announce the top car in each den, but then had the dens come up as they were announced as third, second and first.    It was fast and fun and even with the delay, we got done just after 8:00 which is great for 28 boys with four races each.

Here is some of the sights but no sounds from The Walnut Grove Pinewood Derby 2012:  (I was busy manning the starting button so didn't take many pictures.)

The Pit area

Put the cars on the track.  each boy did their own.

The famous "Bacon" cheer for awards given during a break

Gary with his other Webelo leader and their cars

The Webelos

And for dessert, I took the idea from my Plano Ward (I believe my friends, Robynn and Julie did them):  Our own tire donuts.  The boys loved them.

Thanks to Debbie, the Primary President, who helped me decorate 144 donuts for this event.

Did I mention that we are exhausted today!  But in that good way!

(We are curious if the dads were disappointed to not really know where their son's car ended up overall,  We will see if we get any feedback in the next few weeks.)