Global Warming hits Baraboo

For the last 4 or so years that we have been going to Baraboo, the wheather in almost all cases has never really cooperated. One year it’s freezing cold, one year it rains. Never has it been too hot! Well, this was the year for that!! 

We left very late on Friday afternoon, but we had to run the A/C the entire way there!. This was a costly drive at current prices, that is for sure!

 Thanks to Mr. B for getting there early to set up tents. He mentioned that he almost missed all of the traffic and since we left so late, we seemed to miss it as well. We should probably consider a later start for all our campouts – we didn’t arrive until 1030 though.

Perhaps you thought that this would mean your scouts would sleep in?

Think again….they all seemed to wake up at 6 am!! Even the older ones!

But they were right on time for the Saturday morning flag ceremony:

 

 

 What a glorious day right? It was quite interesting that once we got to the park where they did the flag raising, the ceremony lasted all of 1 minute. Guess everyone was looking to get out there and enjoy the day.

Our Scouts decided that they wanted to go to the Circus World Museum and see the Circus, and some just wanted to go to the Army Surplus store to look at knives! So we had to split the crew up at the museum.  Thank goodness, because it was the younger Scouts who stayed at the Circus and it would haven been really hard to explain why the older boys wanted to wear these costumes:

 

 

 Interestingly enough, there was a neat display of a Circus from 1915 which was themed called Cinderella. As you can see below, it was quite extensive and it appears to have been a big hit – way before Disney!

 

 Beautiful art work!

 Then we were off to the infamous manual merry-go-round. This one had special meaning for a few of the boys, since it was the place of a huge traumatic event; one that they liken to the Battle of the Bulge – one of the Scouts scraped his knee!!  Of course they wanted to return to this for some reason. Why? I have no idea. But this time I thought it might be better to go to the one that has grass around it on the other side of the river. Of course it didn’t. They loved it anyway.

While the other group of boys went searching for pocket knives and other “manly” things at the surplus store, we were off next to the “real” circus! They didn’t disappoint this year. We had a new clown join the team:

He was a natural and I’ll bet Mom and Dad are so proud!!! ( I know I was!).

We also saw one of our former Scouts who joined the Circus: ( anyone recognize this guy?) Where is his Scout uniform??

 

This year there were a couple of acts that were done by the sons and daughters of previous performers. This was one of the acrobats and she is a 4th generation performer.

 Her mother and Grandmother both performed later in the show. Lots of history here.

All in all another great Circus. At the end, our new clown got a partner and they both got to end the show:

So after the Circus, this group got to spend some time at the surplus store and then headed back for the events at the Campground. Sorry to say that no one from Troop 175 won the pig wrestling contest this time, nor did we win the Dutch oven cooking event. We didn’t even catch a trout in the trout pond. Oh well, there’s always next time.

Join us next year!

Da Bears!

Sometimes we don’t even notice the most obvious things in life, even when they are RIGHT in front  of us. This weekend was a perfect example of this – After walking back and forth in front of this stump, I realized that it was in fact an image of a bear that was carved into a tree. This reminded me of our beloved Bears coach  -”Coach Ditka”  – or as it should properly be pronounced “Dicka”.  I asked all your wonderful sons if the knew who that was…….only 1 said he did….

sad…

.and makes me realize how long ago that era was. And how even these young guys, who were just Cub scouts not too long ago, are growing up just too darn fast…….(Yeah I can hear them saying ” Mr. C , is talking about ancient times stuff again). Oh well…I m old!

This years camporee was set to be fantastic. We ordered warm dry weather and mother nature pretty much cooperated. On the way down, we did hit some pretty bad traffic. I think we should start leaving later, say after 630 just to avoid the traffic in the future.

Just a thought. The camp site is right next to the Dresden nuke site and it was really neat driving past the cooling lakes to see all the steam coming off the water in 50 degree temps.

Suffice it to say that the excellent weather allowed us to set up our tents pretty quickly and without incident. Getting set up in the dark is never easy.

Breakfast at the first campout of the year is always interesting. Less so this year because all of the Scouts have done this before. This didn’t stop them from making some outrageous pancakes though:

We had a decent turn out of 8 boys. Even numbers are great for tenting!

The Camporee is usually and opportunity to practice Scout skills after flag ceremonies

The first event was signaling but for some reason I think that they boys wanted it to be beer drinking……ROOT BEER that is!

The theme was “Scouts of the Ring” loosely based on “The Lord of the Rings”. I think we found one of the elves here (or maybe Gandalf)

Suffice it to say that their ”wizarding” morse code signaling skills weren’t sufficient to win this event.

They then had to go through a series of other events to highlight certain skills. This one dealt with cooking – like how hard is it to cook Ramen noodles:

It doesn’t appear to hard, but with this many cooks, you can rest assured it wasn’t a gourmet meal.

Here’s that elf again…he was a Blackhawk fan too!!

Of course considering that most scouts have attention spans of 7.3 seconds, it wasnt long before they were bored with cooking and immediately went into a game of “Ninja”.

Back at Camp we started lunch – And immediately there appeared to be a chair problem:

Note to Moms and Dads, don’t forget to pack a chair!

The afternoon event’s included “Storming the Castle”, essentially throwing tennis balls through a cardboard faux castle. They had to do 6 in 10 minutes.

Suffice it to say, we unfortunately have no future hall of fame baseball pitchers on our team. I suspect that we might not even have any slow pitch softball pitchers either….at least not yet. It took our guys over 10 minutes to only get 5 through the hole. Still, it was probably the most fun of all the events.

Luckily the rain that they had predicted missed us and this was probably the driest and warmest Camporee we’ve ever attended. I guess that’s a good thing!!!

Thanks again to all the parents who help on out these camp outs, Mrs S. and Mr B. were great assets to have on the trip and I know the boys all appreciated your contribution – I know I certainly did, since Mrs. S got the propane that I forgot to bring!

After dinner there was the OA – Order of the Arrow tap out. This is done by having current OA member walk throughout the camp while beating a drum in full Indian regalia.

The Animagus, the Snipe and the Mountain Goat Trail

Once upon a time…….ok you know how the rest of it goes……..there lived a……………..SNIPE?  

Anyone know what a snipe actually is? I’ve heard it is like the mythical bird every new Scout needs to seek out - like a special right of passage - before he can call himself a Scout. The Snipe appears to have been much maligned over the years, since we no longer hear about it these days. It appears to be going the way of the famous “Left Handed Smoke Bender” (which is really a neat and useful invention and I encourage all Scouts to get their own). No one seems to be looking for Snipe much these days, but I can assure you that they are indeed real and worthy of a Scouts pursuit. Here’s one that was supposedly caught:

Looks kinda mean huh? Hang on, we’ll talk about him later.

If you are a snipe believer, you probably also believe in the animangus of Harry Potter fame (a human that can change into animal form) . One of which I think we encountered here:

 

We thought this might be some kind of human in dog form because he was so friendly and he wasn’t just looking of for food. He came to our rescue later on.

So the start of this weekend appeared jinxed from the outset. There did appear to be some dark arts chicanery going on. Snow, that started falling and accumulated several hours before we were to leave, caused a bit of concern for all parties involved. Since there was no train to get on at track 10 ½ to take us to Eagle Cave via Hogwarts, for safety sake we decided to leave by car EARLY on Saturday morning instead of the dark and snow on Friday evening. The 6 am start actually got off without a hitch and we were off to the 3 annual trek to go sleep with some bats. The roads were clear and we made it there in good time. So much nicer to driver without traffic!

The cave has made some improvements this past year. There are two areas to sleep in – upper

and lower ( river room)

 We have stayed in both and each has its pros and cons. The upper is certainly warmer, however it is much wetter . Typically you will wake up with lots of moisture on your sleeping bag after a night. And believe me, the smell takes a LONG time to get rid of (it’s not horrid, just distinctive)

The lower room is much drier. It has more room and level spaces to sleep on.

  

 Little angel right? ( ask his brother)

 

But in years past, its been very COLD in the lower room – mainly because there is an opening to the outside there. The owners have put in a new insulated wall and door. So it’s not that cold any longer. We were placed here this year. And since it had snowed so much, we weren’t the last ones in and thus we had a relatively nice spot to sleep in. Definitely a win for Troop 175.

Oh and just a reminder, there are bats in the cave – but they are hibernating this time of year:

Isn’t he pretty???

Eagle Cave is situated in a very hilly part of Wisconsin.

Add in some snow, are you’ve got some sledding.

However, when we asked about where we could sled, we were told to take a trail and then veer off to another and this would get up to the top of the hill rather than the bottom. I knew where she was sending us and this meant that we could also take the road as we had done in the past. However the road is very steep and typically the boys want to sled down it. Not a great idea. So, looking for an alternate route we embarked on a little adventure in a different direction. As we walked along the gold nugget trail we were supposed to veer off to the left and head down to the hill. We did see what looked like a trail – trees marked with blue spots painted on either side of the seeming “path”. But this “path” was becoming steeper and steeper and it didn’t resemble anything like a “path” at all after a few yards.

Turns out that this was the famous “Mountain Goat Trail”; one which the Cave promotes hiking “up”  – when there is no snow! We decided

Not to be outdone, Troop 175 decided to hike DOWN this hill while it was snow covered, sipping and falling every so many feet, and yes some of the boys decided to try  “sledding” their way down – they are crazy!! This wasn’t working too well for them as a thing called a “tree” kept getting in their way. Near the bottom, one of them decided to jump off this little cliff….

luckily there was quite a bit of snow at the bottom and he was fine. This did not help stop the heart attack I was about to have after watching it! And  of course since the first one seemed to enjoy it, the others joined in.

Sledding was an absolute blast as always;

 Maybe his face is just isn’t showing, but I KNOW he was having fun,

The lake at the bottom was fully frozen and there were  people out there ice fishing, but in our rush to leave, I forgot the most important item you need for ice fishing – the ice auger! So unfortunately we were not able to fish (if anyone is interested though, I would be happy to start the first annual Troop 175 Ice Fishing outing at a local lake. Let me know)

Eagle cave has lots of activities during the day – in addition to cave exploring. Seems the boys were done with that pretty quickly this year, so where did they end up? Playing air hockey and pool in the arcade. I must admit that its been some time since I have played air hockey,

but it was quite fun

 and the round robin tournament that went on kept everyone’s attention for some time.

 The food was great as always; well prepared, hot and tasty along with large portions. The evening entertainment was bingo and this was a huge hit as well. 

Then came the snipe hunt. After much explanation and some embellishment – here we see a little Snipe counseling going on – (someone doesn’t appear to be believing the story too well)

- the boys then embarked on their night “snipe hunt/star hike”. It was all of ZERO degrees but they stayed warm. In the middle of the hike we lost Mr. G. He seemed to have been attacked and taken away by the snipe – in the dark of the night. Ah but the Scouts of Troop 175 valiantly hiked on to the end, accompanied by the dog for some time, who magically disappeared and then Mr. G returned to scare us all. Could be it be????? We’ll never know….till next year!!