Camping in New Hampshire
So this weekend is the big Webelos in the Woods camping trip to TL Storer boy scout camp in New Hampshire. Benjamin and I are going up on Saturday morning. Liz has been doing a great job of helping me get us ready. I will bring TWO dutch ovens this time. I’m borrowing one from the local Boy Scout troop for the weekend. On Saturday evening I plan on roasting a bunch of chicken legs in one of them and making a hashbrown casserole in the other. There’s a campfire that evening and I think I’ll also make a blackberry cobbler later that night.
When I was a kid I went on several of these camporees. But my first one was pretty unpleasant. I was very happy to get home afterwards. I think my brother was there but in any case I was kind of young and I remember it was cold and I was kind of miserable. I remember that I couldn’t get any hot water for my lipton cup-o-soup so I just used cold water and hoped the noodles would soften. It sucked. Ever since then I’ve always felt that good food really makes a giant difference in how enjoyable a camping trip is. You know, you go out and do all kinds of exciting strenuous out-doorsy things all day and by the time you get back to camp you’re ravenous. Good food gives you that warm-all-over-ain’t-it-great-to-be-alive feeling.
Last spring Liz agreed to go camping with me and the kids for one night at Tully Lake. She was a good sport about everything but had never been and didn’t really know what one does when one camps. And she had always pictured roasting weenies and marshmallows as camp food, so that’s what we had and it didn’t really fit the bill. Like I say, she was a good sport but we were so uncomfortable that we started breaking down the tent before the sun was even up. I think we had found McDonalds by 6:30am!
I want this trip to be better. I have several more of these coming up with Gabriel starting next fall and I hope to be a much better camper. So I spent a fair amount of time focusing on the food. The guide/manual for the trip says that the camp will take care of all the meals but I don’t trust them to do as good a job as I can. That is, I’m only going to cook for a handful of scouts instead of 1000 webelos and I think we can do ok by ourselves.
Ben is going to have a great time. The activities include BB-guns, archery, jousting, engineering, fishing and all kinds of sports. They even have caber tossing! I don’t know where I’m going to pack my caber. Yes, the kids will be able to work on some of their achievements but I think the primary focus is supposed to be on introducing them to Boy Scouts as opposed to Cub Scouts.
Saturday afternoon is full of these activities, as is Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon. There some kind of “Hungryman Dinner” planned for Sunday night that sounds pretty excellent. Then we shove off on Monday morning after they give us some kind of bag-breakfast.
I’m a little concerned that it will be kind of cold there. I mean, New Hampshire in October can get pretty chilly. Someone here who is a regular camper pointed out that we should have more blankets underneath us than above us because the ground sucks warmth out of a body. Although I have a self-inflating pad to sleep on (and that would improve things) she said that we would be grateful for the extra barrier. I believe her so I will take an extra sleeping bag or two.
[Rats! it looks like they're expecting a low of forty degrees and there's rain forecast for Sunday night!]
So I’m looking forward to it and I hope Ben has a lot of fun. I’ll let you know how it works out.
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