My First "Unofficial" Venturer Outing

My dad invited me to go along with the boy scouts on a backpacking trip to Wayne National Forest this past weekend. Eventually I will technically be a Venturer but we're having a little trouble with getting enough people to actually start. But anyways, I wanted to go so we went out and bought food and gear and stuff and Saturday morning we headed out.

15 minutes away from where we started, just barely on the free way, our van died. So my mom traded vans with us. Now, about an hour off schedule we headed off again and five minutes later, the other dad following us called and said his car had died too! So we went back to wait for him and he figured it out and we were finally on our way.

It was a really nice drive, I always enjoy the gradual shift from city to country. Plus some of the trees had started changing colors so it was nice. It took about three hours to get there. (Not including the vehicle problems)

So we finally got there and found a place to park. We donned our back packs were on our way.


Unfortunately, I don't have an official "backpacking" pack. So I had to use my old back pack from when I was in school, um... 4 years ago. ;) I managed to shove everything in there and we strapped my mom's old sleeping bag to the front of it. A backpacking pack puts the weight on your hips, not your shoulders, so since I didnt have one of those my shoulders hurt. But I survived.
After hiking and then hiking some more, and then hiking until my arms and feet were about to fall off, we finally found a rather nice camp site.
It was up and away from the trail and out of the way, sort of secretive and really big, it was perfect.




We all got to work gathering firewood and rocks for a firepit.

It took a while but they got the fire started.

Then we started setting up tents.
After everyone was all set up we all sat around the fire and made dinner and talked or gazed at the amazing view of the stars or just sat enjoying the warmth of the fire.





Then we went to bed.
I didn't sleep that great, I was kinda cold and tangled up in my sleeping bag but I did get some sleep. :P
In the morning we enjoyed a nutritional breakfast of hot chocolate and four fruit bars. :) I did anyways, everyone brought their own food.



Then it was time to start packing up and head out.




The forest was beautiful! After a while of trail we finally found the road that would be our short cut to our cars...


On the way home we stopped a local diner-type place to eat and it was really cute. And the food was good.
It was really fun.
We walked a total of about 7 miles over the two days.

Read more at my dad's blog,