Trapper’s Rendezvous 2011

Well it’s been that time of year again.

Trapper’s Rendezvous.

This is a Boy Scout function where 5000 scouts from all over come to one spot and camp out, in January and then proceed to trade the crap they don’t want for other crap other people don’t want.

Oh don’t get me wrong about the crap. Some of it is good crap but there is A LOT of just junk.

½ a toy here, brass casings from fired bullets, empty shotgun shells.

The hot selling item this year (each year something is hotter than anything else) were lighters.

Any size any type any kind.

You could trade that for anything you wanted.

But I get ahead of myself here.

First off, I never in my wildest dreams thought I would actually go camping in the middle of winter.

Sounds stupid to me.

I am not camping’s biggest fan anyway but when my age is higher than the temp, the last thing I want to do is be outside.

But the Beast wanted to go and he wanted his daddy to go with him.

So I went camping.

We were all geared up, thanks in no small part to the in-laws.

The Plan:

Friday night the wife was supposed to be home right after work, about 430, so we could toss our stack of camping equipment into the escape and meet up with the caravan.

Yeah well the best laid plans etc, etc.

I failed to go through my list I had created so we missed some key elements in our packing

Beast’s gloves, Beasts meds, pillows and other odds and ends.

Wife takes her time to get home so we don’t start packing until the caravan was scheduled to leave

We get to the meeting spot and the caravan is nowhere near ready to leave.

Finally at dusk we start moving out.

I have no clue where I am going and then I find out that the lead of our caravan doesn’t either. Not only does he have a heavy foot and is gone in a flash but he is running off of pure memory anyway.

Thank God for GPS.

It’s about an hour drive to the spot and we get there (never once even seeing the other car in our “caravan”) and by luck and some intuition we find our camping spot. In fact we found the camp site before even before our lead driver arrived.

The tone for the rest of the weekend will be set in 5.

5- We find the site

4- We find a stellar parking spot and pull in

3- We hop out to go locate a place to setup our tent

2- I duck past the rope sectioning off our troops spot

1 - I trip over a tent peg and go down hard sucking mud.

Of course Beast thinks this is the funniest thing he has ever seen as I pick myself up and stagger on into the camp.

So now it is night (around 7ish) and I have to setup a tent I have no knowledge of how to setup, in the dark, by myself. Beast did pretty well about holding the light for me while I set it up and while I threw the rain tarp over the tent he set it up on the inside.

Still when I proclaimed it as done (I.E. I was done with it) it looked like some giant had sneezed a tent out of one nostril.

But hey I wasn’t there for my benefit.

My idea of roughing it is limited cable and no room service.

The whole reason I went was because the Beast wanted to go And he had fun. Snowball fights and eating and keeping warm and hiking up and down the whole area (I myself must have walked well over 5 miles, and I know he was moving more then I was ).

But the most important thing was

He had fun.