Is it March?

Welcome back friends. Or rather, I'm back to the world.

Lets pretend like January and February never happened, shall we? Last weekend I took 5 of my scouts out to Jonathan Dickinson State Park for their FirstEver backpacking trip. The first hour or so of the trip started out well enough, there was only one crazy person with a machete following us. I turned around to check on my slower walkers and spotted her. "What's the giant knife for, if I may ask..." She looked down...oh, this old thing? "It's for rattlesnakes," she said while standing with her back to a dreary and ever darkening sky. I'm sure that rattlesnakes are abundant on a 50 degree overcast day... "They're all over here and I got a dog with me." I looked up the hill behind her to see a giant Chihuahua similarly silhouetted by the oncoming storm. "I'm turning around now, I just wanted to let you know that the machete was just for snakes so you weren't scared." Right: thanks lady and happy trails to you, too.

After the machete incident, it poured. Not just a little rain, but skin-stinging-buckets-of-ice-cold-pelting rain. It was hypothermia weather and the girls were all decked out in ponchos, but no rain pants so only the top halves of them, and thankfully their sleeping bags, stayed dry.

Our only lucky break of the day was that it cleared up exactly when we made it to camp. No setting up tents in the rain. Then it was hot dinner and straight into sleeping bags for a bone chilling shivery night.

Here's my best friend the dragonfly. My scouts call it the Jet Engine, because I'm pretty sure that you can hear it over a mile away when it's fired up.

And, beyond that..we did normal camping things. Went on a walk, played charades, played cards, drank hot cocoa and hacked away at an inordinant amount of innocent sticks with pocket knives.


The girls also went nuts with making videos. Here's my interview:

The end, see you again soon.....maybe.