Vermont Guide Weekend Camp

Can I just tell you - it doesn't seem to matter how often I do this, but GOSH a nice hot shower feels awfully good when I get home after a camp! Jen and I spent the weekend camping with the Vermont Guides at the Stuart Glen Campsite in Tynong North. We've hung out with the Vermont Guides a couple of times this year, including for Thinking Day, and they're a blast.

I got picked up by Nina around 3pm on Friday, and after struggling all across town through horrendous traffic, we rendezvoused with Carol, another of the unit's leaders, and headed out in convoy towards the campsite. The town of Tynong is about an hour and a half outside of Melbourne, at least, when the traffic's behaving. We got caught in the Friday rush so it took us almost two hours to get there. We'd left early on purpose in the hopes of having time to do some of the set-up before the girls arrived, but in the end all we really had time for was to unload the cars and set up the dining shelter before it was completely dark!

Jen caught the train out to Nunawading after school and met up with Katie, the unit's third leader, and all the girls, and together they all rode a bus out to the site. The bus got a wee bit lost at the very end - at the site, Nina and Carol and I watched the bus cruise right by on the road. They completely missed the turnoff! The problem was that there were no floodlights or anything to light up the campsite's gate. I trudged back up the camp road to the highway and stood there with my flashlight until the bus driver realized his mistake and doubled back.

The girls arrived around 7:30, and it was completely pitch black at the camp site. Stuart Glen is out in the middle of a decent woodland, but the camp itself isn't all that big - there's a cool A-frame building that sleeps something like 24 people, and one tenting campsite where we were based for the weekend. Everything had to be set up - food and eating shelters, trestle tables, tents, the outdoor stove, the hot water copper - everything. The girls were great workers and super enthusiastic, but even so, we didn't pause for dinner until almost 9pm, and weren't completely set up until almost 11pm! The tents were cork tents of the same design that Jen and I had experienced at the Chiltern camp (note - the photo I just linked to there is from the Barree camp, not this weekend's - for once, I didn't take any pictures!). The cool thing about these tents is that all the pole segments are the same length, so they're pretty straightforward to put together, even in the dark. However they are canvas and really heavy and it was still a lot of hard work. There were only ten girls in the unit and the cork tents sleep five easily - so what we did was to place two of the tents end-to-end (they have doors on each end) to make one huge "barracks" for the girls. Pretty cool - and a good way to solve the "who's sleeping in who's tent" issue!

The weather this weekend was a little odd - it kept showering at inopportune moments (like the nice little downpour we had at 6am Saturday morning, when I had just woken up and was debating whether or not to get out of my nice warm sleeping bag to go visit the loo...). But at least it was warm-ish! I had sent my long underwear home to Canada with my parents, and as I was packing for the camp, I was really rather worried I was gonna freeze. Fortunately that didn't happen. Even so, it took a lot of convincing to get my body out of that nice warm sleeping bag on Saturday morning.

The theme of the camp was "Australia - Canada Friendship". Katie, one of the unit's Guiders, is also Canadian, so there were actually more Canadian leaders on the camp than Australians! The main events on Saturday focused on our first nations peoples and our explorers. We braided headbands and decorated them with feathers. Each patrol of girls (and the patrol of leaders!) made canoes out of cardboard boxes, and then after packing our backpacks with all our lunch stuff, we set off on an adventure, "paddling" our canoes through the woods! In the end we found our way to this little clearing where we stopped to make lunch.

This was really cool. Nina had been there ahead of time and dropped off four metal half-barrels and grills. Each patrol of girls had to use one of the barrels as a portable fire pit, make their own fire, and decide on their own how they were going to cook their lunches. Lunch ingredients/equipment included corn on the cob, potatoes, apples, damper (bannock) mix, newspapers, sour cream, jam, and table syrup. The leaders cooked our lunches on our own fire, strategically placed so we could keep an eye on all the girls at the same time and offer advice as needed. The potatoes were wrapped in layers of soaked newspaper and baked in the coals. We made damper and cooked it on sticks. The corn was placed on the grills and roasted over the fire, and the apples were cooked whole on sticks over the flames, and when they were nice and mushy, we rolled them in brown sugar and ate them like candy apples. Yummy! Lunch took us over two hours to do but nobody cared, it was all great fun. Then we packed everything back up, loaded ourselves back into our canoes, and "paddled" back to our main campsite.

When we returned to camp in the afternoon, we were greeted by the mysterious stranger "Madam Froo Froo", (Katie in disguise, and of course all the kids knew!), who was a fortune teller and correctly "read the minds" of the girls and predicted the messages they'd all written out for her on slips of paper. (That was a good trick and I've gotta remember to add it to my website at some point.) Apparently Madam Froo Froo's appearance is a bit of a tradition with this group - she's showed up at all their camps these past few years - but the girls still haven't figured out how she reads their minds. Ha ha!

The last part of the afternoon, the girls split into their patrols to get to work on dinner and preparing campfire. Jen and I did a good turn by completely cleaning out and re-digging the campfire pit, which badly needed some TLC. We taught some of the girls a really funny skit, which they pulled off at the campfire perfectly. The cook patrol made this delicious meatloaf over the fire which everyone inhaled - no leftovers here! Basically the whole weekend just kinda chugged along - this unit obviously had a good set of routines at camp that they'd used for years. The older girls knew what to do and the younger girls were super-enthusiastic and happy to help out.

I learned a few new things this weekend which I'm hoping to take back to my own unit in the fall. One weekend-long game this unit always plays at camp is "Camp Thief". Everyone drew a slip of paper out of a hat on Friday night, and one person would be selected in this way as the Camp Thief. Their goal throughout the weekend was to steal a small toy wolf figurine which was placed in the equipment shed, and have it reappear near the flagpole in the middle of camp without anyone noticing. Two other people in the group drew "Detective" slips, and their job was to figure out who the thief was. Sunday morning, once everything was all cleaned up, we sat down as a group and the detectives worked to figure out who the Thief was. It was great fun. The wolf figurine will be taken back to the Vermont Guide Hall, there to sit on a shelf along with all the other strange objects that the Camp Thief has stolen at previous camps.

I also really liked how this unit worked their meals. There were no tables at the campsite, just some trestles that we could use for preparing food on. So we "made" a table each mealtime by setting out situpons in a circle in the grass in the middle of the campsite. Leaders enjoyed the privilege of sitting in chairs. :-) The girls on cook patrol were in charge of serving out the food, and the girls in the "camp" patrol acted as waitresses and would take our plates from us as we sat at the "table", get them filled by the cooks, and then bring them back to us. Juice, margarine, and other items everyone would need were placed on trays which sat in the middle of the circle, and were passed around upon request. It was a BIG no-no to cross over the table during meals! Also, the leaders in this unit insist on proper table etiquette, which means that nobody was allowed to leave the table during the meal for a trip to the bathroom or to go get a jumper. And let me tell you, the table manners of their girls were fabulous!

Jen headed for home on Saturday night - she's been so tired this whole week we figured it was better if she had the chance to sleep in this morning in her OWN bed and get some work done for school. So I led the campfire all on my lonesome on Saturday night. I've definitely gotten used to leading campfires with my friends - it was sure hard on my voice (and I'm sure not nearly as funny), doing it on my own. But everyone seemed to have a good time and we sure had some tired girls by the time the fire was over. It didn't take long for everyone to climb into bed.

This morning we woke up to more rain - not a lot, but enough to wet the canvas tents so we couldn't pack them away in their proper bags. Instead, it took all of us working together to dismantle the tents and "sling" them over poles, and then hang them to dry in the workshop. Nina and Carol will have to go back out to the campsite in a few weeks' time and pack all the tents away properly (ugh). Once again the girls were super-helpful and I heard very little complaining from any of them. We did break up the work though - we'd strike a tent, then have a snack, then we struck the next one, and paused for Guides Own, and so on. And before we knew it, camp was over and it was time for everyone to head home!

I didn't get home until after 6pm and let me tell you, I was sure glad Jen had come home yesterday! She'd done all the laundry, done the grocery shopping, made me a snack for the train tomorrow, and while I was standing in the shower enjoying the warmth and great water pressure, she went out and bought us pizza for dinner. Fabulous. Needless to say I'm a little on the pooped side. The coming week's gonna be busy though - I'm off to Traralgon first thing in the morning to meet Di and Adrienne, two local Guiders. I've over the internet with Di for more than 10 years now, so it's about time we finally got to meet!

Off to bed, I'm one sleepy camper...