Mike -n- Mike back from camp

Yes, I just arrived home from "Boy Scout Camp". There is nothing more invigoration than spending a week with someone elses kids. Actually I enjoy spending time with other peoples kids. We live in a remote location, and my son spends very little time with other boys his own age These are pretty good boys, as boys go. In our troop, adult attendence at scouting functions is about 50%. At this function, we were a little low at 35%, with 8 adults, and 23 boys. In two weeks, we will have a camp with 8/17. In our troop adults form a social club of their own, basically it's a sober "Man-Camp". And we are serious about our troop being boy-led. We are only there as guidance. This time around we camped at "Camp Lassen" which is an "in counsel camp", meaning the camp was in our Scouting counsel "Golden Empire Counsel". Next week, we are camping "out of counsel" at "Camp Meriweather", which is a "Gateway Counsel" camp.

Camp Lassen for all it's good points, our troop has not been happy with the "First Class Trail" portion. Which is a series of classes to advance the boys along the basic scouting skills. So we ran our own "First Class Trail". We only got one boy to first class, but we did get a lot of "tenderfoot" scouts to "second class". Somewhere around 40 merit badges were earned too. The food at camp was better than last year, I for one did not lose any weight this year. Although that would have been a good thing, as I tend to run 25 pounds over. But being 6'7", 25 pounds extra gets spread pretty thin over my frame.

My favorite part of Scout Camp, is the "Polar Bear Swim". Which means getting up at 6:30, and hiking (one mile for us) to the lake, where we jump in. Now June in California the weather is usually pretty warm, but the water was not, at 54F. Most swimming activity centered around jumping in the lake for a few minutes, then standing around on the dock warming back up. This year, three of our boys did complete the one mile swim in this water.