Fat Raccoons

Last weekend I got to go camping with the cub scouts!  I once called camping with the boy scouts total chaos.  If that’s true then camping with the cub scouts is ultimate chaos.  The amount of uncontrolled energy is staggering. 

I honestly don’t know how the cub scout den leaders do it.  I really don’t.  Just one night with a large group of sugar fueled, up past bedtime, out in the woods kids make me want to run away to some quiet place and practice Buddhist meditation. 

I let Jacob run while I set up the tent.  He got to play, I got to work.  Part of me wants to make it hard for him so he doesn’t want to go on to boy scouts, but I’m not that selfish.  Yet.  Dinner was hot dogs that were amazingly un-burnt. Chips, chips, cookies, and watermelon.

I’ve always had a hard time keeping track of Jacob after it gets dark.  I know I should trust him more, but it’s hard sometimes.  In any case I got him glow sticks, and that made it easy to keep tabs on him, so that is going to get added to the list standard equipment when I’m camping with him.  He finally ran out of energy at 1030. 

Did I mention that it was cold?  I checked the weather on my cell phone, at bedtime it was 39 degrees.  Once I got him into his sleeping bag and he warmed up he was out like a light.  I woke up a couple of times in the middle of the night, with Jacob partially laying on me.  Ugh.

The morning plan was to get up pack and leave.  Breakfast was on your own.  The Raccoons that visit cub world in the night at Beaumont must be the best fed animals in the world.  Cub scouts seem to drop as much food as they eat.  In the morning I checked out the picnic table we had used for dinner the night before, and there was food still just sitting out.  None of it appeared to have been disturbed; so either it was too cold to the raccoons to come out, or they were so full that they just weren’t hungry.

In either case us people were hungry, so we stopped at IHOP on the way home…