The weekend of October 16-18, 2009 was a special weekend. Yes, it was fall Camporee for the Scouts but was also Kyle's 16th birthday on Sunday the 18th. Of course it rained the Thursday before and was starting to look like Friday would be a rainy day too. The event was held at Allison's Woods north of Statesville. Its a 200+ acre tract of land owned by a man named Tom Allison. Tom is a true son of the confederacy does 1 large reenactment of Civil War battles each summer as well as 6 skirmishes each year. he has a 3000 foot runway (airstrip) of flat grass that he forbids anyone to drive on for obvious purposes. But the woods are really nice and he has about 12-14 campsites spaced around the property. Since our troop is so large, we are very hard to place. We take up a lot of room. So we were given a pretty nice site right off the airstrip about halfway in the middle. We got there to check in at 6PM. It had started drizzling again as we arrived but not a fill on rain. We rode up to our site and the first thing I noticed was the mud was pretty bad. We couldn't get the trailer up the hill so we parked at the bottom. This meant we had to lug all of the 8 chuck boxes (food preparation) and tents, cooking gear, tables, tarps, gas bottles and personal gear about 100 yards. Not a real problem when you have 65 people doing it. But with a drizzle, it just made it aggravating. It took us about 2 1/2 hours to get the site set up. Only a limited number of people really know how to set up the camp. So the ones that did set up the troop gear and the rest set up tents and personal stuff. We were blessed with about 30 Webelos who have to camp with a Mom or Dad all weekend. They (for the most part) haven't done much camping. Some of them had BIG tents, some had small tents and a few actually had "NO" tent. Either forgot to pack them or left them at the church. Finally about 9 PM we had a light cracker barrel and had the troop in bed by 10. Saturday morning I woke at 6 to start helping the cooks. It was not raining but was overcast and colder. The wind started to blow too. But as is always the case at Camporee's, once the events started, everything seemed to be peaceful at the camp. I was letting the new Scoutmaster get his feet wet so I handled things in camp while he worked with the staff on getting boys/leaders situated. The theme for this Camporee was Scouting around the world. Each event had a different country theme. It was actually pretty cool. We finally got a nice fore going and I spent much of the day pulling up old wood for us and helping the staff get wood for the Campfire. Our camp cook really fixed us up nice (Adults and Webelos that is. The Patrols cook them selves) We had dutch oven breakfast casseroles, sloppy joes for lunch and beef loins cooked in a dutch oven for dinner. The food was fantastic. Saturday night we had a great campfire and the boys performed skits and our own Ken R. did a flag retirement ceremony. It was (as always) very moving. Back to the camp for cobblers and hanging around the campfire. Sunday morning was cold but sunny finally. After a great breakfast of pancakes and sausage links, we loaded the trailers back up and headed home. It was probably one of the most fun Camporee's I have been involved in. Maybe becuase I can see my time as Scoutmaster winding down.
