There were rats, rats, rats the size of cats......
Oh what joy, a full weekend of tidying up the HQ and sorting out all the camping gear. 2 Full days of hard slog. I still can't believe exactly how much shite we seemed to have accumulated. We filled an 8 yard skip. Filled it, completely. And we can probably fill a second one with the amount of crap that's still there. It also meant the joy of discovering evidence of rats, mice and squirrels in the attic. If you have never encountered rat shit then frankly keep it that way, it looks and smells disgusting. We also identified, via the bright green colour of their droppings, that mice can't digest the dye used in patrol tents.
So what did we discover?
1. We can put together 12 complete patrol tents (ish!), enough to get all the cubs and scouts under canvas at once and still have plenty of light weight tents to spare! I consider us very lucky.
2. We have a hell of a lot more canvases for dining shelters than we have complete sets of poles for. I consider us not so lucky.
3. There was a leg from a shop dumby in the attic. Why?
4. One catering size jar of pickle. 8 years out of date. Nice.
5. Some old patrol pennants dating back to the 1950's.
6. Some old sailing gear at least 30 years old from when we used to be a sea scout group.
7. Some original 1950's Primus stoves. Worth a fortune!
A hard work but fascinating weekend!
4 comments:
Sound like you've found some interesting things!
I dunno about the sailing stuff, but the Patrol Pennants are well worth keeping as they are part of your Group's history.
For a fun evening, get the Scouts to use the Primus stoves. They are a bit of a sod to get going, but when we tried ours recently, they boil water faster than anything else!
Haha, I know that well.Have you ever seen "if..."? That scene where they clean out the school cellar and find a papier-mache crocodile and guns? Always reminds me of clearing out the Scout storeroom.
this dinning shelter[.FLY] thing is interesting to me and i will tell you why....when we went to blue lake i had mucho sleepiing quarters with me the head honcho in a nice sleeping tent.....welll doug my next door neighor had a big white tent and i hesitated ....my route was to the top of a mountain{skyline} bad roads, we had to build a road to get there....so a gigantic tent that would cover five long tables was questionable.....we set that white dinning tent up near the lake and that is what ended up hq for planning games[when it rained} two scouts just sitting in their for talking...one boy did push ups on a kitchen dinning taable when it rained.....it was excellent, and my sleeping tent was not used except by me....glorious...also i had half barrels that i put charcoal i n,,,and the cooking went so fast...felt like there was so much room when before everyone crowded around for mullegin stew at winter camp and was always bumping in too each other...that was ok though since in the winter we needed to be close to get warmb but for a summer camp ...alos brought own wood to build rafts.....all this took room of course...major job going survival with all that equipment but for two weeks i did more than survie...also a rcommended dinner would be precooked potatoes, about 700 pounds of them
We cleaned out our storeroom a little while ago and found a mice nest on a table! And a couple of dead mice in watercarriers... Lovely, it was.
But luckily, no rats. Just mice.
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