Downe Scout Activity Centre is only 10 minutes away from school and didn't seem very exciting. How wrong was I? Very.
Our school camping trip lasted 4 days that bought us from singing The Periodic Table (x16 I think) to building a raft that was the strongest of all to zip wiring backwards while everyone else was acting out Let It Go. Yep, absolutely crazy...regardless, the mobile (and parent) free trip, let us face challenges and make friends (and also get closer to teachers) while having an awesome time.
As Grey 1B tent group, me and my four friends arrived with their Grey Group hoodies and huge DOE sized backpacks on the Sunday evening. As soon as we arrived, we were faced with our first challenge, one that was very important if we wanted to sleep safely for the whole trip...putting up our tent. After having too short ropes, a hook that didn't fit and then having the whole tent fall down, we pulled through and finally filled the tent with our stuff. Free to explore until dinner, we met up with our other friends and played in the fields next to our tent site.
Let me just put this out there, all our food for the trip was way better than our school lunches and we were pleasantly surprised...although you can't really go wrong with chilli and baked potato or hot dogs. That night we joined with Tent 1A to make our group for all activities and had a scavenger hunt for the ingredient of a pancake that involved us decoding code and doing different challenge (thanks to the blazerbox for helping us). However we did get sidetracked wanting to get a water gun from the teachers who kept soaking us...we didn't get one yet some of us got the chance to soak the teachers back at the camp for being so persistent. The ingredients we collected created a decent pancake/omelette considering we split most of the milk and had wet salt.
The next three days consisted of many water and camping activities, a nature hunt, singing and a campfire night. On Monday, we took a coach, after walking for 20 mins and seeing a llama (and singing the llama song), all the way to Surrey Aqua Sports for a day filled with water activities. That day we did Kayaking, Sailing (with the boom), StandUp Paddle Boarding, WindBoarding? (not sure) and Raft Building. Of course, we all fell in at least once and pretty much swam during Raft Building when the other team's raft broke (we were told to swap). After struggling out of our wetsuits and making our way back to camp, we had a nature hunt with some unusual items such as Size 6 Walking Boots (we took a pair from our tent), an edible item and the number of the security installed. Although we potentially could have been thought of as 'cheating', we came second!
On Tuesday, we were staying at camp to do activities round the site. We did Zip Wire including a lot of singing of ASAPscience songs (all of which our leader, a physics teacher, enjoyed) and Crate Stacking in which although I shook a lot, was fun. After lunch, we were due to do Aerial Track and Rock Climbing, both of which was slightly scary and challenging to some of us (someone, on the other hand, was like a monkey and did the Aerial Track backwards and eyes closed, saying the alphabet!) However, we all did the Aerial Track (x9, once backwards) and all reached the top of the climbing rock. It was a great achievement! We went to the shop to get ice creams and plan a performance for the night's campfire before going back to camp. That evening, we enjoyed having a campfire for our last night, singing songs and roasting marshmallows, although our Grey group song performance was...not so good.
On our last day, we had two more activities before we would sadly leave Downe. We first did Archery before going on to do Jacob's Ladder which I was told was difficult by many who had done it. Despite our group of 4 not reaching the top, I was still happy to do as well as I did. After this, lunch was under a tree in the warm weather that we were lucky to have the whole trip. We climbed trees (with a conveyor to carry food to the trees) and had a mini water fight. Grey being the last to leave, had time to make OneWord stories, play Frisbee and Rounders, have a circle of Dares and Truths and relax in the sun eating leftover ice cream and Pringles.
In the end, we were glad not to put the tents down since putting them up had been such a challenge for us! It was a cool experience that I would so do again (better than how the Y9 said it had been) and definitely made me closer with many people.
May the MASS x ACCELERATION be with you,
Hanshi x
