:: 2007 - Gilwell Park
For their 50th anniversary celebrations, and as part of the national celebration of Scouting’s Centenary, 3rd Hindley chose Gilwell Park, the national home of Scouting. An extra night (so even less sleep for the Leaders!) was added to the programme allowing us to fit in as much as humanly possible over the course of the week.
The first day of the camp saw the grand opening of ‘The Gordon Bennett’, a new tent named after the leader that ran the Great North Run to fund its purchase. We’ll hopefully be sending him out again soon to buy another one!
In other birthday celebrations we held a party night with a buffet plus all the usual fun and games (in the rain of course!) This activity saw the Leaders, Explorers and Scouts joining together to work together as teams to win the prizes (and heckle each other)
You can’t visit Gilwell without visiting London so that’s exactly what we did; we only just missed out on the World Record for ‘most sights visited in 2 hours’, thanks to Alastair’s spectacular route march around the capital.
Of course all the old favourite activities were included, such as grass sledging, shooting, archery, kayaking, low ropes, crate stacking, widegames, water slide, mini olympics and climbing to name but a few.
But, in a re-run of the Millennium Camp, the most talked about activity was the petrol go karting at Rye House. Over two sessions, (one for the under 16s and one for the Leaders / Explorers), rubber was burned as the lads tore round the track. As Andy Woods put it “that’s the best bloody thing I’ve ever done on Scout Camp!”
Quote of the week goes to Gordon Bennet: “the reason the pop is so weak is because it’s all floated to the bottom”!! (Or did he mean the water’s sunk to the top?)
As usual all this couldn’t have been done without the dedication of the Leadership team and their helpers. And we mustn’t forget Pete the wagon driver for getting all of our gear down there and home safely and in one piece.
