Hello everyone, I'm just writing to let you know that I came back from my expedition yesterday & I'm in lots of nasty delayed pain. Here's the extended version:
*takes deep breath* The expedition itself was brilliant, the first day especially. On Saturday we started at 11 and finished by 3:30 - we'd put up our tent, played a few games and eaten our tea by the time any of the expedition groups came back! Later that night we all got a bit hyper and I may or may not have started shouting "RAVE!!" at people whilst flashing a torch at them and expecting them to dance... lol. Then we all went to bed and started talking about matchmaking everyone in the campsite lol but what we discussed and concluded will stay secret heh. Let's just say that most of it was extremely unlikely. Then we all tried to go to sleep but there was a storm and loud church bells nearby and a car alarm that wouldn't shut up. So we woke up quite a lot lol.
Day two was pretty good too, although we did discover that the river which we were supposed to be studying had dried up. And that I'd forgotten our lunch for the third day lol. But we made loads of notes and assigned different parts of the project to different people, which was productive heh. I am apparently going to be covering "General Knowledge About Rivers" which includes me pointing out that rivers are wet etc. xD We finished at 3:45 but apparently the leaders said that they wouldn't pick us up until 4:30 because we'd been way too early the day before, so we all sat by the side of the road (I went to sleep) and waited for 45 minutes before calling them.
Later at the campsite, it was Abbys birthday so we all got cake. I had two extra half-pieces because our dinner was taking so long to cook. In the end, when it became apparent that it was going to take another hour before we even close to being able to eat, Bernard came round and offered to let us use the bigcooking stove in the Leaders tent where we then spent most of the rest of the night cooking and making hot chocolate. I slept a lot better that night, but I vaguely recall that all my dreams were completely bizarre and terribly confusing, as they usually are when I'm tired or stressed.
Day three was okay. Quite early on we trudged through wet grass and for some reason my boots decided not to be waterproof anymore (must look into this), so then I spent the rest of the day with cold, wet feet. Not nice. I have lots of horrible blisters and painful feet that I'm blaming on the squelch that I could hear with every step. Anyway, we happily celebrated the end of the day by going to a giftshop at the reservoir and writing our names on a chalkboard that was for sale heh. We also used the loos and were pretty horrified by our first good look at ourselves in a mirror since Saturday morning. Not nice.
So yeah, overall it could've been WAY worse. It was windy and it rained for a bit, but I had my awesome coat which kept me dry and warm. We didn't get properly lost at any point (thanks to our wonderful navigators - ie. anyone except me) and we didn't have too many massive gigantic hills (although we had a good share of them methinks).
I am extremely glad that we did Exploration and not Expedition as I am really not all that keen on the idea of walking any further than I had to this weekend. Let's all applaud all the people who walked really, really far. *applauds*.
I really need to stop writing now lol. This has already turned into Mr Long Post.
Peace out,
Lindley xx
