I missed last month due to my committments with Scouting Ireland. I spent the weekend camping in gorgeous weather conditions out on the lovely Charleville Estate near Tullamore, Co Offaly.
Setting off from the den with great intentions and no firm venue for our camp, we started off with just five scouts and two leaders. Having arrived up at the castle and been given an impromptu tour of the place we still had nowhere to camp, because our kindly hosts already had an event on that night. Seems that the spirits aren't too keen on the company of young people during a paranormal investigation!
Eventually we struck gold! The land owner of the estate allowed us to use what is affectionately known as The Shinfield. So called because my partner in crime somehow managed to rip his shin open in this very spot this time last year, resulting in a scar that took well over three months to heal...
Thankfully this years camp took place without any great drama's, and my partner in crime's shin remained intact. The scouts and leaders spent many happy hours setting up camp and gathering wood of all shapes and sizes, stacking most of it in preparation for this years County Challenge in an adjacent field. They even brought some of the smaller stuff back to our camp so that we could use our alter fires to cook on and practice making rope ladders...
Funny thing is that this all started off quite innocently. Within a couple of days it transpired that for the County Challenge I was to take charge of the rope ladder base, whereby I taught the scouts how to prepare and make one. This entailed engraving their names onto the logs that they prepared and it was very much a challenge! Over the course of the following weekend I taught 85 scouts how to do the honours...
I should have some nice pics later on, if I can locate the disc and figure out how to upload them. As some of you already know, it seems that I blew my mother board up so am having to reinstal all my lovely programmes onto my son's pc and the laptop. Of course that wouldn't be much of a problem, only I seem to have mislaid some of the discs in amongst the chaos that I like to refer to as my filing system. (Cough, splutter, blush...)
