12 Days Of Summer Camp

Day 2

Day 2 arrives and I’m lying in my sleeping bag, doing my best to sleep (obviously). Suddenly I hear one of the camp leaders banging a spoon against a frying pan outside our tents to wake us up. At that hour in the morning, the sound resembled a dying cat trying to sing opera. No one wants to wake up at 7:00am, especially when you haven’t gotten any sleep the night before. He continues to bang on the pan and I’m thinking If you want to shit that frying pan out tomorrow morning, it can easily be arranged, bang on it again and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I continue to lie awake in my sleeping bag, not really doing anything, and I finally decide to wake up. Not surprisingly, it is still raining outside and I step outside my tent to get ready, and I see something. It caught my eye like a large quarter pounder meal with an apple pie and a sundae. Or maybe a chicken n’ cheese burger..... Or a fillet o’ fish........nah I’m going to stick with the quarter pounder. But there he was, staring me right in the face, someone who looked just as good as that quarter pounder meal. Suddenly, my anger towards him for waking me up disappeared, and I found myself gazing. I quickly snapped out of it. This camp was already complicated enough, I didn’t need something else distracting me, one wrong move at this place and you’re a gonner.

So I walked into the kitchen to start on breakfast. Breakfast was probably the best meal of the whole 12 days. If I could live on one meal alone provided by the camp for the next 11 days, it would have been the toast and butter. Anyway, so I’m munching away and we get told what our first activity of the camp is. Great, I’m thinking, this is where the real hell begins. It’s probably going to be something almost physically impossible that could very well get you killed if you’re not paying attention and instead are staring at a certain someone.......  So the first activity is a 2 hour hike along some river. Close enough! What are these people thinking? Take a 12 year old off the street and ask him what his first school camp was like. I guarantee you he says something like, “It was the funnest thing I ever done” (He obviously hasn’t been to Nether). What would posses someone to think that forcing a bunch 15 year olds to undergo hard and consistent physical activity for more than 10 minutes would be the, “Funnest” thing ever? Why? The things people do and think these days, it baffles me.

So they drive us to the start of the track to make it so we end up finishing back at camp. While I’m on the bus, the driver is making a dozen turns, going up hills, down hills and after ten minutes, we’re still on the bus! Then I’m thinking if this guy keeps driving, it will be way quicker to walk straight home than go back to camp. He finally parks the damn bus on the side of a...... I really want to say road, but, unfortunately, it looked like a bunch of rocks with a thin cleared area just wide enough for a single car to drive down it.

When I started the hike, I was astonished with the very low level of safety shown. I don’t know why anyone would think that path is safe to walk on. It started off with a rocky road (and not the one you’re thinking of, even though I could really go for a rocky road right now) that slowly disappeared into a sea of grass and large boulders. For a moment, I felt like Bear Grylls and as the hike went on I was thinking there is a strong possibility something could happen to me on this hike, and if it does, I need to put all the time I spent watching TV and put it to good use! So from then on, I started thinking more like Bear Grylls. I pretended I had a machete in one hand slicing the long grass out of my way, and narrated in an English accent. “Being brave isn't the absence of fear. Being brave is having that fear but finding a way through it.”  And believe me, I was shitting my pants. We were hiking on the edge of a damn cliff, and I am not over exaggerating. Right below us was a river flowing at an uncontrollable rate, one wrong move and you’d be swimming amongst the incredibly large and deadly rocks by the water.

So I continue walking and for some reason, the people in front neglected to tell me there was a person long ditch covered in grass, so it was no surprise when I almost snapped my leg in half falling into it. By this time, all my energy is completely gone and all the enthusiasm I have left was squeezed out of me when my feet got tangled in these looped weeds on the ground. I somehow manage to pull myself out of the hole (no thanks to anyone who took the time to turn around and see me fall in the hole, but for some reason, not enough time to help me out) and I limp the rest of the way. So I think to myself This hike cannot get any worse, I have gotten to the lowest point of this hike, until, I find out the next part of the hike is to walk through tree branches that blind your view of the rest of the track for a good ten seconds before you finally see the light at the end and are finally able to breathe again.

As I exit the tree, my hair gets caught onto one of the twigs and almost breaks my neck as I struggle yank it out and continue the walk of death. Now, at this point, I am at the end of my patience, im walking through trees and instead of holding back the branches for the person behind me, im just letting them fly, I really do not care. I look up ahead, and can see the tents in the distance. It was the sweetest sight my eyes ever saw, oh wait,that would come in second place after vanilla custard canoli. Anyway, I continue to walk, and finally finish this hike, but not before the final stage. I look directly above me and see, the final hill I have to climb. I’m going to describe this hill as simple and as accurately as possible. Draw a 90 degree angle for me. That’s the hill.

By the end of the hike, I looked worse than MC Hammer in harem pants. All I wanted to do next was take a shower and not be bothered by anyone else for the rest of the day. So I grabbed my clothes and was about to hit the taps until one of the camp leaders said,

“You actually can’t take a shower everyday because we run on tank water so we need to use it efficiently”

I was seriously considering hammer fisting her but I thought the last thing I needed right now was a lawsuit so I just turned around and calmly walked back to my tent. I lied down on my sleeping bag trying to recuperate from the tragic experience I was forced to endure. This was only day 2, and if I was going to survive another 10 days, I needed to toughen up.    

Hope you liked the second chapter! Dont forget to comment below about some of your bad camp experiences