Guide Camp
Aug. 6th, 2006 04:42 pmWell we survived County camp. The first part of the week was far too hot and then the second part of the week was far too wet! We did however manage to get the tents down dry. Overall it was a pretty good week.
I'm not at all sure I would recomend running a guide camp with a three month old in tow. I ended up feeling I had split personality due to spending part of the time with my Guides and part of the time in the central staff building - having been offered indoor space for overnight. Since T still frequently wakes for a feed in the middle of the night it was a help being in an individual room rather thatn a tent where we could have ended up waking the whole camp. It would also have helped if I had a team that was more experienced/used to working with each other. I ended up with three adults (plus myself). One of whom had never been a guide and had only camped once before. One of whom we had never actually met, although we had emailed and had spoken on the phone and who had lots of camp experience but very little as a guider. And third a local guider who again had plenty of camp experience but very little as a guider. All in all it worked really well despite the odds. The girls all enjoyed themselves and were safe and well fed, which is the important thing.
I have several memebers of the central team to be thankful to for help with T. Aunty Rosemary's get to sleep service was wonderful! And the "calm down the stressed guider" service provided by our County Commissioner was good too.
Having got the tents all down dry R and I were able to get pretty well everything back into the loft on Friday evening - leaving just one tent that needs a minor repair, the box of very assorted pegs and ropes which I want to sort out/tidy up, one tent which needs a zip replacing and one tent which when we got it out appears to have had something eat it and I need to investigate how badly and where to see if it's worth repairing.
Now all I want to do is sleep for the next month!
I'm not at all sure I would recomend running a guide camp with a three month old in tow. I ended up feeling I had split personality due to spending part of the time with my Guides and part of the time in the central staff building - having been offered indoor space for overnight. Since T still frequently wakes for a feed in the middle of the night it was a help being in an individual room rather thatn a tent where we could have ended up waking the whole camp. It would also have helped if I had a team that was more experienced/used to working with each other. I ended up with three adults (plus myself). One of whom had never been a guide and had only camped once before. One of whom we had never actually met, although we had emailed and had spoken on the phone and who had lots of camp experience but very little as a guider. And third a local guider who again had plenty of camp experience but very little as a guider. All in all it worked really well despite the odds. The girls all enjoyed themselves and were safe and well fed, which is the important thing.
I have several memebers of the central team to be thankful to for help with T. Aunty Rosemary's get to sleep service was wonderful! And the "calm down the stressed guider" service provided by our County Commissioner was good too.
Having got the tents all down dry R and I were able to get pretty well everything back into the loft on Friday evening - leaving just one tent that needs a minor repair, the box of very assorted pegs and ropes which I want to sort out/tidy up, one tent which needs a zip replacing and one tent which when we got it out appears to have had something eat it and I need to investigate how badly and where to see if it's worth repairing.
Now all I want to do is sleep for the next month!