On the 15th of November I set off to Green Beret and Gilwell Park, (the head of UK scouting), at 6:45 in the evening. We were supposed to arrive by 8pm, but we got stuck in traffic as we tried to enter the campsite along with the other 146 teams arriving at the same time. As we arrived we were given directions to where Letchworth & Baldock were camping.

We quickly found our leaders and sat down around the table to discuss tactics and rules. We went to bed early that night as we had orienteering at 7:30 the next morning. As we woke up to Gareth telling us to get moving, we tried to get some warmth into our toes and go into the mess tent to receive some porridge and information on what to do.

We headed off to the start/finish point and went on our way. By the end of it we thought we’d done really well, but we found out later that that was not the case.

Once we’d gone back to the camp and eaten some eggy and fried bread, we headed to the assault course. We started by doing a six minute run to the first obstacle, which then had a paper trail that you had to follow from one base to another. After doing several bases we went back to the tents for some lunch. My favourite obstacle was when we had to crawl under a cargo net, a tarpaulin with a tunnel in and then another cargo net, which was surprisingly heavy.

After some lunch of hot dogs we went out to do the day activities. I really enjoyed the archery, and also the Network’s activity which was like a big game of Ker-Plunk, just without the marbles. After we had a lovely spaghetti bolognese for dinner and cake with very powdery custard for pudding, we set off on an adventure to our evening activities.

In the evening we had another several hours of fun to enjoy. My favourite activity was probably trying and succeeding to climb over a van, however the Network’s was also quite fun. For the van we had to get our whole team over a standard sized van along with a pioneering pole. This wasn’t too hard as we had watched how previous teams had done it; but had it not been for the wood covering the van, I may have put a rather large dent in the side of the van.

Overall the whole weekend was very fun and a good experience. I’d just like to thank the leaders who were there with us and everyone that arranged it.

Tom Ferguson