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| This is an exaggeration of how cold it was on 1990's 6th Grade Camping Trip... but not much of one! |
Because you see, like I mentioned yesterday, after the Sixth Grade Camping Trip of 1990, The Weather was never just small-talk for any of us in my class again.
We had cold, cold weather on our Sixth Grade Camping Trip. Rain. So much rain. Both nights of the camping trip, it rained. Torrential downpours, even! The first of the two nights it rained so hard that the roofs of the tents were bowed down with water. We were told that the tents wouldn't leak as long as we didn't touch them when there was water bowing them down.
That's like telling a kid not to pop a zit.
Anyway, on the second night of the camping trip, we didn't have to worry about rainwater bowing down on those cotton canvas tents, because there was a thunderstorm with lots of wind that blew open tents. On the bright side, the wind also blew the water right off tent roofs!
When it wasn't raining, we were treated to a constant cool, cool mist, much like one would imagine is the case in Scotland. We learned to paddle canoes in the mist and drizzle. We really got something out of our garbage-bag shelters during our survival and orienteering modules. We fired rifles and bows and arrows while squinting through intermittent raindrops.
We didn't have campfire activities when it got dark, because of the cold and the rain. Our chaperones had to find alternative activities for us to do besides campfire activities. They made it look as though they'd planned on us having our singalongs inside, all along, and that putting on skits in our campsite groups was just a part of a camping trip. They did a really good job of keeping us entertained during those three rainy days.
As for me and my classmates, the rain and the cold were the things that stand out most prominently for us about that trip. Someone will always comment about how they will never forget how cold and wet their feet got on that trip. I remember I came home with one of the worst colds of my life and spent the post-camping trip weekend, which was sunny and hot, hot, hot, by the way, holed up in the living room chair, with cold medicine and VapORub and a nose that felt like it was stuffed with hardened concrete.
The cold and rain gave my class a complex, I think. Field trips weren't plentiful when we got to High School, at least not the kind where the entire class piled on a bus and went somewhere. Seventh Grade's trip to the Buffalo Zoo was the last time. It was a drizzly May day.
Our Senior Trip was the next field trip that perpetuated our collective complex. Just like was the case for our Sixth Grade Camping Trip, the class ahead of us had beautiful weather for their trip to Virginia Beach. In fact, kids from our year from other schools had beautiful weather at the beach the week before we got there, as we learned from the locals as we blew into town.
My class? We had gray skies and temperatures in the fifties. Rain. Drizzle. Persistent mist. We followed up the rainy beach with a rainy trip to Busch Gardens. Skies were gray. There was drizzle. Persistent mist. The first day we toured Washington DC, we had to look through raindrops running down the charter bus windows. We were all soggy and a little miserable in our obligatory picture taken on the steps of the Capitol Building. The only nice weather we had was the last day of the trip, and we were only in town for half the day, before we headed for home.
It always felt like something of a metaphor for the whole way things went for my class. I think it definitely left a mark on us all.
But the Sixth Grade Camping Trip wasn't all cold weather and rain. We got to do a lot of cool stuff that Kids These Days do not get to do on school trips, usually. But that's a story for another day.
How about tomorrow?
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