Braised Boy Scouts

So the weekend after the “Bacon and Poo” meeting we had a two night campout planned. 

The reason I say braised is that when I woke up at about 2am Saturday morning it had to still be in the mid 80s with 110% relative humidity, and no matter how much of the Nylon tent I unzipped no air was moving.  I didn’t sleep.  I braised in my own sweat.

But, I digress.  There was a two fold purpose to the trip. 

One was for me to get a few of the first years together Friday morning and go shopping for food for the weekend.  Well that didn’t work out so well.  I had some family stuff planned for Friday morning that ended up running over.  Instead, after everyone was gathered for the trip to the camp site, we divvied up the money and ran to the farmers market.  Boy scouts are suppose to be thrifty, BUT trying to feed 14 people, 5 meals, with an average of $20 per meal isn’t thrifty.  It’s cheap.  So we got the farmers market, divided the kids into 5 groups of 2, and gave them each $15 for their assigned meals with $30 for Saturday night dinner.  The menu plans was:

Dinner 1: Hot dogs, buns, ketchup, and watermelon.

Breakfast 1: Eggs (two dozen), Bacon (1 pound, so yes one strip per person, oh, and it got burnt), and Sunny Delight (two bottles, cause apparently the scouts who did this meal, really like Sunny D),

Lunch 1: Sandwiches.  Two slices bread, one slice of lunchmeat, and one slice of cheese, no condiments, but we had chips!  Doritos and Cheetoes!  

Dinner 2:  The big one! Uh. Bratwurst and dump cake?  Really that’s it?

Breakfast 2: Pop tarts, mini-honey buns, and Oranges.

The other main purpose was to get the first year boys to finish their fishing merit badges.  All they had left to do was to catch, clean, cook, and eat one…

They caught enough for everyone,

But they were too small to fillet. So instead they got de-scaled, gutted, and beheaded.

Some liked their fish, but most of them ate as little as they could get away with.

Another theme of Boy Scouts is to give back to the community, aka service projects.  In this case it was using nearby native material to build up a crossing point on a creek for the farm’s small tractor to get across with the brush hog.  As the scout discovered it easy to get things stuck, and buried in the sand

The tractor got stuck going across, thankfully not too terribly, we got it free in short order.  It did not get stuck on the return trip.

The boys got a lesson in “you get what you pay for” Saturday night.  They didn’t want to spend the time to gather dead wood for the camp fire.  So the camp fire didn’t last long, which was fine with me.  Camp fires when the day’s high had been in the upper nineties aren’t all that fun.  There were some skits and a scary story by the Scoutmaster.  The scary story really came out of left field.  It was a story of the great economic meltdown of 2008 and pending monetary meltdown.  The story seemed to be based from the perspective of “hard money”, and I didn’t agree with where the story said things were headed.  After a long day in the sun, and a bad night sleep I figured that the scouts weren’t really listening (or understanding if they were listening) to a story of high level macroeconomics, so I didn’t say anything.

All in all it was a sweaty, hungry, sleepy, dirty weekend.  Just the way it should be!