On Tuesday Tilly and I went to Guides summer camp! It was my first time and Tilly’s fourth.
It rained quite a bit (for most of the days, and the ones where it didn’t were very cloudy and miserable) but we did some less important activities then. Two of the biggest, more interesting points were indoor skydiving and Box End Park, where we did an inflatable obstacle course on the river!
First I’ll tell you about Box End. Basically it was an enormous river-lake-thing with a huge inflatable obstacle course floating on top. You had to wear your swimsuit and then a wetsuit over the top, and the wetsuit had just been used five minutes before by, if you were unlucky, a boy, and the under-arms stank and were wet with a mixture of sweat and river-water. But it was worth it; it made the water feel a lot less cold, and it was better to wear a wetsuit instead of a swimsuit because then your swimsuit would stink and get filthy and get duck and goose poo all over it. Anyway, the obstacle course was really fun, only the lifeguards had gone over it a second before and slopped river-water over it, so it was extra slippy! Everyone kept on falling in and it was hilarious! I went round with my friends Fay, Rachel and Aoife (pronounced Eefuh) and we fell in a lot more than I think we were meant to 😀 There was an enormous drop slide there too! You know if you go on a drop slide, it can’t be verticle because you would simply go head-over-heels to the end? Well, this one was verticle, because there was a net acting like a little roof so that you couldn’t flip down! It made me feel like I was vomiting my own stomach! (In a good way. I didn’t actually vomit anything.)
Now I’ll tell you about skydiving. Basically, it was a really long tunnel with air blasting at 50mph from the bottom. You had to wear this suit with handles so the instructor could grab onto you and swing you around by them, and you also had to wear really, super tight goggles, so tight that none of the air would get in or it would, quite literally, blow your eyes out. You were called in and Antonio, our instructor, had all these complicated hand signals that he used to calm you down, straighten your legs, open your fingertips wider, and so on. It was amazing!
After Box End, we went to Mollivers (the Brownie camp place nextdoor) to do some craft activites. I made a little memories booklet and helped someone with down syndrome do theirs. It was really fun – there was juice and cake and biscuits too!
At night we chatted for a long time… but then we always went to sleep. We slept in our sleeping bags inside a tent and it was amazing! I’ve been singing all my campfire songs all day… land of the silverbirch… home of the beaver… where still the mighty moose… Right, I’d better shut up now or I’ll be keeping you reading all day! 😀