Ireland: Camping

We woke up at 3AM this morning and I called home because it was actually a fairly decent time there. Everyone got ready really quickly and we met Tony outside and hopped on the bus. Everyone fell back asleep the second we sat down while he drove us through the Irish countryside and up to the outskirts of Belfast where a Girl Guide camp is located.

After the bus ride this morning that I mostly slept though, we finally arrived at the Girl Guide camp in Belfast. The ride took six hours. We ate breakfast in the main house on fancy plates. I ate rice krispies, apple, and some toast. I really like the imitation American food they have here.

The main house where we ate breakfast

The Girl Guide camp is so much better than the hostel we stayed at in Cork. Instead of two rooms with three sets of bunk beds and a private bathroom, we have four rooms. Our room has four beds with drawers and closets. We have a somewhat clean bathroom down the hall.

After breakfast, we unpacked before heading to the climbing cube. We were talking to the girls at the cube who were ranging in age from eleven to fourteen and they brought up the show “16 and Pregnant”. They asked if it was a traditional in America. It’s funny the type of culture we convey through the television.

The climbing cube was fun. The first run was rather boring, but the second time up I was able to jump off a landing and hit a small punching bad while they took a picture.

After climbing, we went to archery, which made me rather uncomfortable because I’m not very good at it. I was able to hit a couple of bull’s eyes, but I didn’t win anything. Amanda won a curley-whirley, which is like a candy bar, for getting the most points.

Next we split up with our rooms for lunch. I had a ham sandwich on wheat bread with an apple, salt and vinegar crisps (ew!), a kit-kat, and some type of cookie with chocolate on top in a brownie shape. It was filling. It was kind of weird though because they had us eat under a huge tent all by ourselves.

After lunch, we went to shooting and practiced with BB guns. At first I didn’t get it because I wasn’t looking down far enough, but I finally figured it out and managed to hit a few targets before we switched to the sling shot activity that was really boring. Finally, we went sledding down a grassy hill using sleds with wheels on the bottom. The sleds were way too small for us.

We went back to our rooms and some of the girls changed so they could go on the river run, which looked torturous. Guys walked them through a freezing river with water up to their waists and threw buckets of water at them. I’m glad I didn’t do it. Some of the girls from our troop who participated walked away with large scrapes on their hands that had dirt in them. They had the hardest time finding peroxide to clean them out, apparently they don’t use that as much over here.

For dinner, we had ham and mashed potatoes. There was also sweet green peas and pineapple. At first, we thought we were going to starve because the portions were tiny, but thankfully they gave us seconds. Desert was vanilla ice cream and apple crumble. The vanilla tasted different, but good. I didn’t like the crumble though. It tasted too much like apple pie without cinnamon.

After dinner, we felt like celebrities. Everyone wanted to swap badges with us and talk to the Americans. We participated in a challenge that involved running around camp and doing random exercises. We met these girls – Caitlin and Chloe – who were really awesome. They joined up with us and we did pretty well. We tried to exchange facebooks and e-mails with as many people as possible. Everyone loves the Americans.