Horsing around

Wow it has been far too long since my last post. If I'm honest it has been out of sheer laziness. BUT I am now finished for summer and with that comes all the holiday spirit. We all think of beaches, vacations, waking up at 11am and all these fun things to look forward to.

All my assignments are handed in. All my revision will hopefully pay dividends as I scrap through my exams. I can't help but feel a little anticlimactic. It almost feels like I started my summer holidays last weekend. I was out on a camp with the young men. I say camp... I've never been on a camp like it. When I think of a camp I picture a field in the middle of nowhere. There is nothing but some tents and a freshly dug out toilet. We spend the evening kicking a football around and throwing the Frisbee back and forth. Finally when it gets dark we have a camp fire. Sit around cooking some food, telling stories and finally the YM are sent to bed while the leaders wait for hours on end for them to fall asleep.

Admittedly this final point was not something I really wanted to replicate. But let me describe this camp...

We arrived at the YM presidents house. I'll describe it as this. My dream house. It was in the country. 2minutes from the house was a beautiful rock outcrop. The kitchen was exactly how V and I had planned our dream kitchen, there was an indoor pool with amazing vaulted ceilings. It was a barn conversion like no other. There was unbelievable attention to every detail. It was amazing.

But that's beside the point, actually is really isn't. The evening had a contingency plan of "if it rains we'll sleep in here" We kicked it off with a swim in the pool. Playing games in a nice heated indoor pool, hardly the being thrown into the freezing lake I was used to. After the pool we had pizza delivered. The YM could eat until they were full. We then went upstairs to a huge projector and screen. We watched a film. Only then did we actually go outside. It was pretty warm. The YM were shattered. When we reached our destination we, at 1am, pitched our 2 tents. One for the youth one for A and myself. They were both 3 man tents. We squeezed 5 YM into one while we had the other.

This was now more like the camping I have experienced. I have always been drastically under prepared and it always shows on a night. I had a nastily thin sleeping bag. I forgot a floor mat, and I was wearing shorts. Eventually everyone was asleep. All except one. Then I heard it... either one of the YM has the strangest snore in the world or there was a horse right outside the tent. It was 3 am by this point and for the next 30 minutes I listened as the horse was moving around.

I eventually fell into an uneasy sleep. I woke up every few minutes until around 5.15 when something hit the tent. I was a little confused until 15 minutes later it happened again. There after it started happening more frequently. Until about 5.45 when A finally woke up to what was either a YM pulling some kind of joke or a horse trying to eat the top of the tent. We poked our heads out the door to see that actually there were about 8 horses surrounding us. One kept stamping on the tent and nibbling at it. We shooed them off and woke the YM up with a nice tent shaking.

 

After we had broken camp we had a nice cooked breakfast in the kitchen. What a camp out!

 

This had been set us off. Even V wants to camp out now. I love the outdoors. We have always planned this summer to be a camping summer but I never really thought it would happen. Luckily we have found a camp site in the peaks and we are going to go next week. We are both really excited and can't wait to spend a couple of days camping for real. Enjoying the countryside and not being woken up by a horse. All that remains to be seen is how prepared we really are for our adventures into the wild.