Our Webelos den had its first official experience camping with older scouts this weekend and it almost qualified them for the polar bear patch. You can get the polar bear patch if when you wake up there is ice on the fire bucket. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, for the Webelos a warm front moved in about 2:00 am and the temp rose to about 50 degrees. After spending the day in the woods with the Scouts running around in 39 – 42 degree weather that felt like a heat wave and it kept any ice production to none.
Saturday morning we get to the campsite about 11:30 and get set up. Thankfully there was a spot to park near the site otherwise we could have been lugging our camp gear about ½ miles up a dirt road. After setting up camp we joined the Scouts on a tour of the area they had been doing their skills in the night before so they could see where they were, and we got to do the skills with them during the day. That was pretty fun, the boys learned how to do some basic orienteering and they got to try out the other stations, with the exception of fire building.
Then it was hanging out by the campsite for a few hours ‘til dinner and then about 8:30 we all got in line and set off down the trail to the “theatre” which was a bunch of logs on the side of a hill overlooking a nice shallow bowl to act as a stage. It was there that they had skits and songs for about 30 minutes then it was awards ceremony time. Of 17 patrols there, not one patrol was able to finish 12 of 12 stations and only one patrol was able to finish 11 of 12 stations over the night and that patrol was the patrol our Webelos are attached to, so there is a great foundation they will be joining in a couple of years. In fact they were the only patrol to be able to make fire without matches, boil water and cook oatmeal that night. Then it was back up the trial to camp about 10:00. By then I knew my son was not going to want to stay the night, he was getting to that point where he was starting to get too cold. As the Scout Master put it “Once a young in gets cold it takes a lot to warm him up,“ and he just wasn’t having any fun at that point. The icing on the cake though was he had to go pee, and since kids these days just don’t seem to understand the benefits of a tree, he had to go to the port-a-pot. With all the clothes on he barely made it there in time, in fact he ended up spraying a lot and getting himself wet some, which really upset him so we changed clothes and headed home. I can see I’m going to have to spend some time getting my boys to understand how to go pee in the woods. So about midnight we gathered some of our gear and went home. Thankfully we only live about 3 miles from the site otherwise it would have been a long night for both of us. As it was, once I got home I couldn’t sleep so I spent the rest of the night just lying there in bed.
We got back to the campsite about 8:00 and took down out tent and collected up the rest of our gear and helped the scouts break camp and pack up. That took a while and we didn’t get home until about 11:30. The rest of the afternoon for us was also jam packed with activities and a Halloween Church service that lasted ‘til 8:00 pm., whew, it was a long weekend and by 8:45 pm, last night, I was out, I literally collapsed on the bed while trying to watch Extreme Home Makeover and the Sunday Night football game. I was so tired my wife had to wake me up at 9:30 so she could get under the covers. LOL
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