It was my first time ever camping!
So obviously we needed to buy a lot of camping gear like sleeping bags, headlamp, sports wear etc. The weekend before going on camp I went to Lakeside Joondalup mall to do any last minute purchases.
The camp was on 2nd September Monday and we were there for 3 days, returning on Wednesday. I was soo nervous but excited as it was my first time camping. The camp was part of the school’s Stepping into Adulthood experience for the Year 9 cohort.
Day 1
We reached the camp at around 10:00 in the morning and the first thing we did was participate in the welcome ceremony. It included introducing the camp rangers and getting sorted into the groups and introductions. After we talked with our camp group and assigned roles like navigator, medic, cook and environment officer we started hiking. It felt extremely hard to carry all our gear and walk a very long distance to our camp site.
It took a while but we reached our campsite and quickly got to work pitching our tents. Me and my friends put our three tents next to each other in a small circle so our entrances face each other. I was sleeping in the tent with my best friend.
After pitching the tent we set up the kitchen. It was quite tricky as shelter for the kitchen had lost one of its poles so we had to tie one end to a tree and it looked kind of slanted.
Chicken and egg game
So, this was one of the first games that we played at camp. And it sure was fun.
The rules of the game: one person stands in the middle as the chicken. Around the chicken are small balls that will be the eggs scattered around. There will be more than one team and the players try to get the eggs without getting caught by the chicken. The chicken can hit the person who tries steal the eggs, however the chicken cannot move far away from the eggs. The players can only steal one egg at a time and only one person in one team can have a go each time while the others wait in line. The game was soo chaotic with people cheating by stealing more than one egg at a time or by distracting the chicken. But it was all part of the fun and everyone enjoyed it. We also did a nature walk after that.
At the evening after we finished our games we started gathering wood for the fire. And soon after we had a nice campfire where we could sit around it. After resting for a while some of our friends started making our dinner which was Beef Bolognese. It tasted really yummy!
It was really surprising to see how dark it got really fast and soon enough we needed to shine our headlamps to see. But it was also really cool to see the stars at night with just the campfire being lit.
After it was dark we started playing another exciting game called 30 minutes in the darkness (I don’t know if its actually called that or something else).
30 minutes game
This was one of my favorite games in camp. So, the teachers basically assigned us places in the pitch black forest where we would sit for 30 minutes. Rules of the game: One person per one hiding spot. We could use our headlamps if needed but cannot talk to other people that are hiding. We can’t use a phone or check the time and have to guess if the 30 minutes is up. If you feel like its exactly been 30 minutes then you can come back to the fireplace from hiding. The person closest to 30 minutes wins the game. It was very scary to be in the dark for 30 minutes and my time was 28 minutes which was close enough.
Spotlight
The game we played after that was a round of spotlight. It is played in a dark environment and almost follows the rules of Hide and Seek. Rules for the game: one player is designated as the ‘seeker’. The seeker is given a torch/flash-light and loudly counts a number of seconds. During that time, the rest of the players must run and hide. When the seeker is finished counting, they search for the rest of the players using the light of their torch. They can tag a player ‘out’ of the game by shining the light on them and declaring the player’s name.
After playing these games and hanging out by the fire we soon started heading into bed at around 10:30pm. It was my first time sleeping in a tent and it felt uncomfortable at first especially as we had pitched our tent in a slightly sloped area (oops) which made one side higher than the other.
I was soo excited for the main camp sports we were to do on day 2.
Keep reading the next part of my camp adventure in the part 2 of my blog. Until then stay tuned!…