Nine boys and four adults all went camping at Worth Ranch this past weekend in the cold and wet drizzle. It actually turned out to be a really good campout.
The focus of the campout was to bring the Troop Trailers back into shape. This seems to be a never ending task to organize and clean all the troop gear. The troop has two trailers, a troop gear trailer and a personal gear trailer. The Troop Gear trailer is a large tandem axel trailer that carries all the troops camping equipment. Tents, Stoves, Pop ups, chuck boxes, tarps, cooking gear, etc. The personal gear trailer is just a small single axel trailer that holds the backpacking equipment and all personal gear carried to the campout.
The thought is, get to the campsite, open the Troop equipment trailer, get the campsite set up and then open the personnel gear trailer. This method serves two purposes. If it is raining, individual gear will remain safe and dry in the personal gear trailer as the camp is set up. More importantly, it keeps the boys focused on setting up the campsite before they start worrying about themselves.
Needless to say, from campout to campout, gear comes in and out of the Troop Gear trailer and is returned in various conditions. In a perfect world, it always goes back into the troop gear trailer dry and clean. We do not live in a perfect world.
The nine boys successfully emptied the trailer, cleaned every dish, utensils and organized every tent. It was a long day, but they did a wonderful job in the cold. They did find the time to collect firewood, set up an ax yard, and provide themselves with enough firewood for a wonderful campfire.
The trailers are now in great shape, we are ready to actually do rank advancement type of activities at our February campout.
The only regret for the whole campout is that we got up at 6am on Sunday morning so that the adults could be back in time for the Cowboy game. In retrospect, the time spent in freezing while packing up to make in back to Dalworthington Gardens to have time to watch the Cowboys lose would have been better spent in a warm sleeping bag.
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