Soo on Saturday I woke up at 6am to be at Queens Road by 7:30 and I spent much of the journey north trying to catch some more sleep. Once we got to our starting point, the crappiness began. We began by trudging through a field which was 50% mud and 50% grass that was as long as our knees. Then we just walked for miles and miles and miles. We stopped here and there to figure out where to go next, but we stuck strictly to the route that we'd planned. My rucksack was very very heavy, I was later told that it was about the right weight for someone 4 stone heavier than me. So Saturday was by far the worst of the three. We walked up really steep hills, and I spent a deppressingly large amount of time at the back with Amey, considering that she'd had some horrible operation and was not in good enough health to carry a proper rucksack, whilst I was in perfect health and I was still struggling as much as her. We also went down some extremely steep hills, and at several points decided that it was impossible get down without great risk. Only Patti slipped and fell once, and she was lucky enough to be caught by a tree, so she was fine. At the bottom of one of the hills there was a river by which we ate our lunch (which was horrible) and then played pooh-sticks on the bridge. I also took my boots and socks of and stood in the freezing cold water. When I say freezing, I mean it. My feet were numb afterwards. It wasn't nice. Then we had to climb back out of the valley, and the footpath at the top which we were supposed to follow had a sign on it with a stickman on it which was crossed out. This man and his two sons joined us not long after and told us to go through anyway, so we did. We got to a campsite and some of us refilled our water bottles... I can't remember what happened next after that lol. We had a couple of other amusing moments throughout the day, but they were mainly when we were trying to cheer ourselves up, as opposed to actually having fun. We got back to the campsite at 7ish, which was 2 hours later than planned. Put the tent up, ate some food, texted mum, dug around my rucksack for Bongo (my favourite stuffed toy who goes everywhere with me xD) and went to bed at 8:30. Woke up briefly two hours later when the other two crawled into the tent, noted that it was now dark outside, and went back to sleep.
The next day was possibly the very best. No, it definitely was. Woke up to find myself as the only one who managed to stay pretty much on her designated spot. Patti was lying diagonally across the tent, and Helen was sort of parallel to the door... A bit like this:
As you can see, we were a bit muddled up. Anyway, we got up and were going to have breakfast - but we didn't have any milk, and neither did the leaders. However Bernard did provide us with 3 kit-kats, one of which I ate gratefully. Anyway, we set off and before long began enjoying ourselves. By then someone had realised that my bag was way too heavy so they let me leave my part of the tent with them. I was in a pretty good mood after that. We actually began the route by walking along a very long road for a very short time, considering how long and hilly it was. Jamie, Hannah and Bernard (leaders) drove past in the minibus and stopped to check on Amey and let us know that we were going the wrong way. Luckily we had managed to cut a sizable chunk from our route, instead of adding to it. That was pretty awesome. We celebrated and tried not to giggle childishly at the snail-sex that was going on on the wall next to us. So we left the leaders and went off to continue our adventure. On our way we saw lots of people and said hello and other wondrous things. The ground was still pretty muddy but it kept us concentrating on what we were doing lol. Then, after climbing a particularly nasty hill, we decided that the route we were doing was just ridiculously long, even though we'd cut some of it already, and that we didn't want to do it all. And that we wanted to go shopping for more snacks. Can you see where this is going?We decided to head directly south to a small town (the name of which has slipped my mind) thus getting closer to our final destination, instead of taking the slightly longer route which we had originally planned. We also got to go to a local Co-op and buy some Dr Pepper!! - at least, me and Patti bought Dr Pepper. Everyone else got crappy drinks that nobody cares about xD We also got some chocolate, though we already had enough sugary snacks crammed into our bags, and we got some milk for hot chocolate and cereal x) We all got a bit hyper.. I forget the general order of things that happened, but we had lunch next to this weird pigeon house thing and then we only walked a short distance before we bumped into some leader who had water for us (though we had to grip onto the side of a wall and slide across because the whole pathway between the two fields was blocked by a giant puddle). After that we went downhill for about an hour, which was awesome. Then we went along a valley and were followed by cows! We put the blame on Patti, who we've always agreed has a creepy obsession with four-legged animals :P So basically, Sunday was a good day. But I'm not finished yet - because it was the birthday of Jess Allen! So we decided to throw her a little celebration after her having such a crap day (her group was made to walk 15 miles on that day, even though we're only supposed to do 10 a day) We were a little over enthusiastic though, and anyone might have imagined that we were throwing a full-blown party. We sat in the tent and made crappy little paper decorations using only Helens notebooks paper and crayons, later joined by some sellotape and scissors which we managed to get from the leaders. We also decided that we needed some food as well, because we were also celebrating the last time that Me, Helen and Patti would camp together (neither of them are doing Gold, and I'm not really sure whether to or not) so we saved the prawn crackers that the leaders gave us after their chinese takeaway (I know. Tchuh.) and we managed to get a few other things from people around the campsite. The A-Team made it back to the campsite after their long walk so Patti went off to talk to Packwood, while me and Helen snuck around the campsite to pick some flowers. People gave us weird looks. Later, Jess and the rest of Group 4 made it back from their walk and we had cake etc. but Jess wanted to eat and take a shower before she came to our tent so we tried to make sure everything still looked okay & we began holding frequent group meetings about all kinds of crap. After a while Packwood wanted to see our decorations, but knowing that he'd just be mean about them and wanting to keep everything a secret (even though we were way too hyper to be any good at keeping anything this trivial a secret) we tried to stop him. In the end he fell into our porch and nicked our bottle of milk. I'd like to remind you all that we were painfully sunburnt and blistered and we'd walked all for about 10 miles that day, and it's really not difficult to stop being hyper and to start being really angry and upset when you're that tired and in that much pain. So after about half an hour in which he refused to return the milk, and lied to the leaders about the whereabouts of it, we were pretty moody. I only just came to my senses in time to do "the right thing" and told Helen that we shouldn't really unpeg their tent and take all the poles out because Packwood didn't even put it up in the first place from what I'd heard, and he was unlikely to do so the second time around. It was getting darker by the time we'd cheered up enough to invite Jess into our tent for some smile-time, but she was tired and only stayed long enough to drink her hot chocolate and play a game of snap. However we stayed up for another half an hour or so, talking (very loudly) about all the random crap that happened in all the past expeditions. It was pretty funny how angry everyone was lol. Especially the A-Team who were pretty close by. They kept calling me then telling me to shut up - I wonder why they didn't call the other two? Helen said it's because I'm the least scary. Patti has the power to break up with Packwood and Helen has the power to actually break Packwoods neck. I, however, can..uhh.. not do a lot. Must remind myself to be more intimidating or something. Apparently I laugh too much to be scary xD
Anyway, this post is now getting WAY TOO LONG. If you're new, I apologise. I usually try to keep it short, honest. So monday came (yesterday) and we all woke up in the right place. Like Saturday, it was far less eventful than Sunday. However, it was just as happy. We started on the wrong road again, and followed it for ages again, and cut off loads of our route again. However I don't think we cut quite so much on Sunday as we did on Monday. We ended up being way ahead of schedule, and we sat in a field of sheep putting on suncream for a nicely long break to celebrate. After that break, Patti decided that we should play some of our old DofE games, which started being old favourites like ABC games, in which you have to come with a kids show/singer/band/film/etc. beginning with each letter in turn. For example, Helen would say 'Arctic Monkeys', Patti would say 'Blur' then I'd say 'Coldplay' etc. etc. etc. It's a good way of seeing who knows the alphabet by heart without singing the song xD However once we ran out of ideas for ABC games, we just started playing I-Spy, which turned into Ich Spy-en Mit Meinen Kleinen Augen, Something-en beginning-en mit... (everyone knows that when you can't remember a German word, you should just stick '-en' on the end :P) most of the things that we spied were a bit crap, like 'tree' and 'wall' and 'field' and 'grass', but the one that won (which was mine) was F.P. and nobody guessed it after agesss and loads of clues (the answer was Foot Prints :P)
Later in the day we found ourselves, after searching an entire golfcourse for our footpath, at a forest and we walked through it for about an hour, though we were only supposed to be walking for a short while through it. When we finally came out at the other end (after lots of loud singing of the Playdays song "Roll Up and Ride on Rosie" in Helens ear, coming from me) we asked this couple where we were on the map and they pointed to somewhere on the map that was far closer to our final point that we could have ever imagined and we had soon finished our silver expedition! It was about 2 o'clock, and we sat down by a gate which said "Anyone who omits to close and fasted this gate will be subject to a penalty not exceeding forty shillings" while Amey, Niamh and Tanya went to the shop down the road to get icecreams. It started to rain properly for the first time since the expedition began, but we were under some trees and were protected. We phoned the leaders but they said that might take a while to come fetch us. About half an hour later we saw Group 4 walking past, and they pottered around a bit and bought some ice-lollies before heading off again and we sat for quite a while longer, watching the dog on the other side of the gate, who I could only imagine as a dog version of Mrs. Norris. It seemed like we were going to be stuck there forever, when finally we saw Jamie's cool car slide around the car, (I think both me and Patti screamed "JAMIE!") then he was followed by Bernard in the Minibus (I don't think our screams of joy were really words anymore). We rushed forward, chucked our rucksacks on Jamie and hopped excitedly outside the minibus as we remembered that it didn't open from the outside-- though I didn't really pay attention to what the five other girls were doing lol. When we finally got onboard and sat down, the momentary excited buzz started to turn into relief, which just turned into wanting to go to sleep. We were soon joined by another group of girls who were a lot louder than us, but they weren't talking about anything interesting so I started to doze off until we got back to Coventry (I don't think I've been so glad to see those big blue "Welcome to Coventry" banners in a long time).
So that was my weekend away. I would've written less, but I know that I won't be able to remember most of this within a week or so. I know that there's a million thing I haven't mentioned in here, like how other groups apparently having hailstones and downpours while we've had nothing but sunshine, and the squashed hedgehog we saw, and how we all sank into the mud, and how bad my sunburn is, and how terrible our collective matchmaking skills are, and how disgusting ones feet look after walking around a campsite in flip-flops, and how my trousers kept getting caught in barbed wire so I now have holes in my trousers. I'm still pretty sure that there are plenty of things that I can't remember from the weekend already, because that's what always happens lol.
Sorry again about the length of the post lol. I just like typing. It's so relaxing after not being online for so long xD
Anyway. I'll stop now. The entry is truly worthy of the title "Mr. Long Post".
