Camping

The Middle Child, aka Martha Stewart, Jr., and I went camping with the Girl Scouts this weekend along with 4 other girls and one mom from her troop... and a whole bunch of other troops from our area. We went to one of my favorite places, a Girl Scout camp located upstate a ways. I'm told it's "luxury camping" since we were in cabins and we had showers with hot water, power, and refrigerators. We didn't have heaters, though, and in those non-insulated cabins it was pretty chilly in the middle of the night! We were lucky, though; the temp only dropped into the 50's while we were there. It's supposed to get down into the 30's tonight! Yowsers! I think I would've been bundling us up and driving HOME if it had gotten that cold. I can handle 50's, though. My sleeping bag is pretty cozy, plus I had a fleece liner and doubled up sheet to round it out, then I had on my flannel jammies, socks, and my leg warmers. (Left over from the 80's, but very handy.) I was positively toasty.... until I had to get up and go pee at 4:00 a.m. That was brutal.

Daylight started out cold but warmed up. We spent Saturday morning, through lunch and into early afternoon, participating in structured activities with the whole group. (There were around 100 of us there.) They gave us the rest of the time to do as we pleased, which was perfect. We went back to our cabins, relaxed for a little while, then got started with cooking dinner. For previous Camporees our meals were catered, but they decided not to go that route this time. It was a lot more work in terms of advance planning, but only because I haven't camp-cooked with my girls before. Once we got down to actually cooking, it was fun. We kept it simple for most of the girls with hot dogs on a stick. I don't eat hot dogs so I took leftover chili from home, but I was able to make some boil-in-bag rice over the fire to go with it. I also had a popcorn popper and the girls had fun making several batches. (The last batch burned, probably because we didn't clean the popper out properly before hand. The other batches were perfect.)

The cooking and clean up becomes an activity in and of itself when you're making food over an open fire. The girls got to help every step of the way, from lighting the fire starters to cleaning up using the 3 bucket system and their dunk bags. I think they learned a lot while we were there, in addition to all the fun. They made friends with the older girls in the two other troops at our campsite, too. All in all, it was a great weekend. Give me a week or two of recovery time and I'll be ready to go again!