Glenny Wood activity day

Last weekend we were meant to have our only camp under canvas (in tents) before going Sweden. Unfortunately "Due to family illnesses, injured leaders" the camp was canceled :(


Instead of having the whole camp, we had an activity day on the Saturday :)


We arrived at 10:00am and after watching Kevin (who had broken his thumb) assembling a cardboard toilet for us to trial, we split into two groups to make a gateway out of pioneering poles. Our groups was loosely based on a pentagon and was big...very big.
After we had finished assembling it, we realized that none of us were tall enough to lift it all the way up, and the structure wasn't strong enough to allow us to do it from the base.
We then decided that if we tied rope to it and threw the rope over a tree we could winch the whole thing up, this worked well....until we ran out of tree

The gateway was taller than the tree we were trying to winch it up with so we had to take the whole thing down and move it over to some flatter ground with a very tall tree on it and after some struggling, we managed to get the rope over a branch and we winched it up

It looked very good, we even managed to tie it up with guy ropes and let go of the rope we had used to win ch it up. Unfortunately this didn't last very long before well...

...it fell down.

We then untied it all and and put the ropes and poles away. I then went to see the other groups which was not quite so spectacular...
We then all ate lunch and talked for about 30mins to an hour before splitting up into our patrols and lighting fires. The challenge was to collect enough wood to keep your fire going for 30mins without collecting anymore while the fire burnt. We were the first to light ours and lit it with one match - naturally.
We also did not run out of wood.

Around the same time we had individual photos of each of us taking in our uniform. Simon also arrived and I talked to him for quite a while along with Kathryn who arrived just after and the other leaders. We then tided everything up and finished up.
Simon gave me and Tom a list home and offered that we came with him to help out at the Bath half which I will write about in my general blog (http://ethan-rose.blogspot.com)