h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh boy do I have some good memories of camping as a Scout! And some not-so-good ones too. For example:

Camp Milo. For those of you outside NZ who don't know what Milo is, it is sort of like hot chocolate only nicer and better for you. But Camp Milo (it deserves the capitalisation!) is another story entirely. It is always cooked in a big pot. I'm fairly sure that, unlike normal Milo, it has no milk and no sugar in it. Heck, I'm not even sure if it even had any Milo in it! Mabey it just had brown in it. Anyway, the end result is a mug full of hot brown water.

Steve's Stew. *shudder* I'm glad I missed this particular camp. Steve made his (in)famous Stew. The thing is, it tastes fine, but an hour or so after eating it, everyone is lined up outside the longdrop.

Ahh memories.

That may have been the corned beef. Could have that effect on you. May also have been Steve's standards of hygiene.

I was always intrigued by the "pocket stew" recommended in a cubs' handbook. Each child was to take a small amount of chopped meat and vegetables wrapped up, which were all stirred together and cooked to make a stew. But if these were in little boys' pockets for a whole day (most probably in summer!) - I hate to think what condition the meat was in when it hit the pot.

Glad the entry hit a nerve!

The required meal for us for every week-long camping trip was one-pot stew. It wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't for all the stewed tomatoes. And in my patrol it wasn't a campout until we had had at least one grease fire from cooking bacon.

For all you US guys, if you ever go to Philmont for Kanik, stay away from the grease bar. It's basically a bar the size of a pemmican bar made out of pure bacon fat. The pemmican bars aren't all that great either.

Something neat I was taught in my new troop (I'm now a young ASM in a different troop). You can make an omlette by breaking an egg or two into a Ziploc freezer bag, adding whatever you want, squeezing it up throughly to break the yolks and get it all mixed together, and put in boiling water to cook. This is just as cool as foil cooking, which is great as well.

Yes - I just read that one somewhere.

Typical American - produces a load of garbage.

We were taught when really primitively camping to keep rubbish to a minimum - especially if you're camping miles from any facilities. Who's going to put out the trash then?

A really brilliant idea I picked up when doing some American Girl Scouting was how they wash up. They have a big bowl of hot soapy water and a big bowl of hot non-soapy water. All the kids wash up their own stuff and then put it in a net bag which is otherwise used for washing tights. It hangs on the line to dry, where they can collect it before the next meal.

When on a camp with 50 Girl Guide in Cambridgeshire, we once had boiled eggs for breakfast. The Guider in charge of cooking performed the miracle of producing 50 perfect boiled eggs simultaneously - something that I can't even manage with 5!

It wasn't Cambridgeshire, it was Norfolk, but that is entirely irrelavent really.

I am still a scout (even though I should have left over a year ago) and one of the best activities we do is called a "Wide Game."
If you are not familier with these the general jist goes like this:
1 troop of scouts, in the forest, in the dark.
There are many different games but the most popular is the 'capture the flag' game. 2 teams, 1 flag. one team defends the other attacks. these games involve stealth and night vision, especially to see what you're about to crawl through...
Superb!

I have played them in the daytime. I can remember being in a huge park. One team were Roundheads, the others Cavaliers. But I think we still had to capture a flag or a princess or something. All without a joystick!

In the dark was a lot better, you would fall over, land in bramble bushes, run into tree branches which are virtually invisible...