12 Days Of Summer Camp

Day 7

Day seven I wake up and I immediately notice a change. I hear silence, a sound I haven’t heard in 7 days. It’s rained for so long the sound of raindrops against the wall has been embedded into my brain that now the rain has stopped, it sounds rather weird. But then it gets me thinking, sure, it’s really great it’s stopped raining, but now we have to do an ACTUAL activity. You never win at this place. One minute, you think you can see a streak of light in the distance but the next, you get pulled further back. No mercy at all.

It was time to get to the hall for breakfast and I realised I was running out of paper plates. I needed to think smart about this. No way was I letting those plates recede the desired safety minimum of 15, so this would be the first day I wasn’t eating toast and butter. You know those little jam and butter samples in the little plastic things that they have at hotels and stuff so you can butter or jam your bread? Yeah, I had those…….. Minus the bread.

Before we started our activities for the day, we had to prepare our dinner in advance so it would be ready by 5 or so. Today’s lunch menu was cut up your own vegetables and chicken and chuck em into a pot that will be placed on the camp fire to cook. What did I tell you? Whatever requires the least amount of energy but most amount of work and inconvenience will be done. Our tent groups get together and start preparing our dinner. We cut up the chicken, carrots, potatoes, beans and chuck em in along with salt, water, butter and some spices for flavouring. I was starting to think maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. It looked delicious in the pot and for once, I was actually excited for dinner. I could smell the food and it reminded me of what people in the real world are probably eating. After preparing the dinner, the director informed us of our next activity. What joy.

“Ladies, today we will be mountain biking. There are three different tracks, easy medium and difficult. I will be making you ride all of them today”

Wait a second. What is the point of having three levels of difficulty if you’re going to make all the beginners and advanced riders go on the same ones anyway? I honestly don’t know what people are thinking sometimes. Then it hit me. This place has mountain bikes? Since when does the portal to hell have bikes? Nether doesn’t have an oven let alone mountain bikes. Weird.

So I’m doing the usual routine, rolling down the hill like a tumble weed in those western movies, until I get to the bottom and in front of the mountain bike shed. The instructor goes through the safety instructions and blah blah blah and then something really weird happens. She grabs a helmet to demonstrate how to put one on, and as she grabs it, she jumps back and starts to laugh. She shows us the inside of the helmet, and there is a bird’s nest in there. What does this tell you about this place? Birds and making homes in the bike helmets, obviously this bike shed isn’t really a “shed” it’s more of a bird sanctuary that happens to have bikes around.

Moving on from the bird situation, I select a bike, chose a helmet that isn’t home to a bird family and get ready to ride. The beginner’s course has already screwed me over. The whole track is a series of uphill hills and it is as if we’re defying the laws of gravity by riding on the hills because they’re so steep. After I conquer the hills we have to cut through a …… I really want to say field, but if I do you will probably be picturing something with large green open spaces and daisies like from little house on the prairie.  How wrong you are if you have this image in mind. What I mean by field is a narrow strip of long grass that is basically on a cliff. One wrong move and you and your bike are riding merrily down the stream of water crashing against rocks. To top it all off, the green grass is so long, you can’t see anything on the ground, which is extremely unfortunate because there are low cut tree stumps EVERYWHERE. I felt like I was playing minefield but when you lose, you don’t just get a sad face pop up on your computer screen, instead you get a sad face in a hospital bed with a strong possibility of all four limbs broken. I surprisingly manage to get past the stumps and I’m riding feeling like a boss because I just conquered the tree stump minefield. I guess the 2 seconds of cockiness came back to bight me in the ass because I didn’t see the last tree stump up ahead. I was going at a decent pace when my front tire completely stopped, the back wheel flung into the air, and I was catapulted about 10 metres away from the crime scene. I tried to get up when the bike finally made its way to where I was and knocked me back down. It still wasn’t over, because the people riding fairly close behind me stacked on me like a pile of pancakes on a Saturday morning. I finally got myself up and dragged my bike up with me. I rode all the way back to the bike shed where I basically gave everyone greasies for the rest of the activity. Well, at least the accident stopped all feeling to my foot so I was relieved of the sting from the bull ant bight.

Dinner arrived and I was so excited I couldn’t feel any pain. Well I couldn’t feel anything but that’s completely beside the point. The pots were brought inside and the aroma of vegetables filled the air. It smelled so good. We opened our pot and started putting food into our plates. I went to fork a potato but the fork bounced right back.

“Maybe it’s just a bad one”

I thought to myself. So I went for a piece of chicken. I cut through it to find it was completely pink. Potatoes and carrots with a side of salmonella. Nice. The potatoes were rock solid, the chicken was pink, the carrots were like bricks and I don’t know what the hell happened to those beans but they should never be allowed to be called beans.

I was still extremely hungry and needed something to eat. I subtly carried by backpack over to the counter and poured a few of those jam things in. After all, I still had a few of that food I brought left.

I went back to my tent to sleep but before I did, I looked over all the subjects for year 10. I was still in the middle of selecting my subjects. I was thinking of some sciences and stuff, but I wanted a bludge subject and one of them really caught my eye. I saw outdoor recreation which is basically going ice skating, rollerblading and laser tag all class.  Sweet, sounds easy enough! I decided to sleep on, I needed it after everything id been through.

Hope you guys enjoyed the seventh chapter! Dont forget to comment about some of your bad camping experiences!