WOO-HOO! I'm BACK!

OO-RAH! Finally I get some time to update my blog. Gosh it's been what like, 3 weeks since I last psoted anything? Anyways I've been so busy with Ranger camps and going in between it's not even funny. Oh! I'm going to try and get photo's of the camps posted sometime this week. Anyways the first camp I went to was TRACE. Basically, it's bootcamp for FCF (Frontiersman Camping Fellowship) candidates. Basically it's the elite of the elite Rangers. Anyways they taught us all sorts of mountain men and colonial tricks ranging from traps, to tanning. The first night I was there, they had an Indian Raid and stole all of the candidates food. I somehow was overlooked in the Raid and I was able to hide my food. All that the candidates were allowed to eat during trace, was hard tack, beef jerky, and tea. Since I kept all my food from the Indians everyone in my company was being chummy with me trying to mooch my candy bar and chili can. LOL. lets see, the second day, they took us out on a shooting range and taught us how to load, maintain and fire a black powder musket. I shot a 54 cal. Thompson Center muzzle loader. I scored fairly well, enough to win a prize or two. OH my gosh. There was this one kid there who weighed about 50 pounds while wet. They loaded his musket with around 100 grains of FF powder (THATS A LOTTT OF POWDER) anyways, when he fired it, he wound up right on his butt. Everyone was laughing and crying and this kid had just a stupefied look on his face from shell shock or something. The last day, we did a competition of all the new candidates to see who learned their skills the best. I won second place out of about 35 candidates. OO-RAH! that made me feel good.

Now this past week wasn't nearly as good as TRACE. Ranger Camp can be a good thing, and it can be an ok thing. So we have this competition for all the teenagers called the Iron Man. It's a 2 mile up hill run with an obstacle course in the middle of it. I was so pumped up about competing in it and then the impossible happened, I was in a dunk tank letting some kids get me wet when i took a bad fall, I landed on the side of my foot and totally busted my knee and shin to a pulp. My shin was a bloody mess and I was still gonna run the iron man. Buttt unfortunately it was cancelled becasue of the winds which i'll talk about in a moment. So the next day, the winds had died down and my leg was doing better enough for me to hobble through, then the final straw to break the camels back landed. I was on an obstacle course going over a log over a stream, then my foot slipped and I would up jamming my knee between the log and a tree. I fell forward at full speed and busted my knee AGAIN. oh well, at least I scored 2nd best out of about 120 other guys. So i didn't compete in the iron man which im still bummed about. Ok now for the crazy winds. we had a constant wind of abot 50 MPH and the occasional gushes that would be anywhere from 75 to 110 MPH. incase you don't know already, that's pretty bad. A tree about 3 feet in diameter fell on a tent and nearly killed a kid. It was pretty bad. SO the camp staff confined everyone to the open fields and camps till the wind died down. We were all sitting in camp trying to entertain ourselves when my little light bulb flicked on. I was like... HEY! we dont have to sit here, lets go make kites! So we took those huge factory sized garbage bags and soared the good ol' skull and crossbones on our kites. after about 30 minutes of plastic flying, I had another light bulb turn o. "HEY! lets use the tarp!". I think you can pretty much guess the rest of what happened. WE had a 10x8 tarp that we sent sailing to the highest of heights. AHHH good times good times. All this would be a bit funnier if i had photo's so im going to try and get some posted eventually. Alrighty until next time, later and hoo-ah!
Rosemary