Chapter One - In the beginning..

Weds 21st July

It all started at eight o clock on Turnfurlong road. We were 45 minutes early. Enthusiasm? No we just overestimated the traffic. Honest. After numerous trips down to Tesco’s to buy last minute supplies the mustard yellow coach "Lady of The Lench" arrived and our bags were chucked mercilessly on board. We were READY TO GO!
As with all diaries, we include crappy little bits of no relevance such as who ate what for breakfast and how many marshmallows I can fit in my mouth (17). Now comes the description of the bus driver.
Actually a woman, she was really "into" rock music and bands so old that we’ve never heard of them. WHAT WAS WRONG WITH OUR MIX TAPE?
Finally we settled with The Chilis and strangely enough, there’s something remarkably moving about roughly 25 voices singing along to "Californication" in unison. Ahh :)

We stopped at a service station and settled for a "Wardy Ward V Framer Jennings" one on one air hockey match. Sadly, air hockey is probably about as close as they can get to playing in the NHL. Unless we don’t know of any significant skills they may have with their sticks…

Back to the bus! Many rounds of "Slapsies" – which I swear died out in Year Six– and Arm Wrestling – the REAL mans game. Which Zoë also played. And just for the record, Double-Barrel Dan Hughes-Morgan lost at Slapsies. Everybody laugh at him now.
After wandering up and down a hill, the coach finally decided to stop by a large field in the middle of nowhere. This appeared to be our new home for that evening. Welcome to "The Homestead"…

Okay, despite the fact that the toilets were about 300m down a hill and that the portaloos in our field had no light, no flush and no paper, everything was fine! And it did have a rather large tepee in the middle of the field which added to our amusement. (Possibly because it has "pee" in it. We ARE teenagers after all..) Yes the field was muddy and yes the neighbouring field was full of cows but we’d all been on previous expeditions before so we weren’t exactly expecting The Ritz.

We hadn’t pitched our tent in about five months so our attempt was … interesting but we were damn proud of our shack! Even if it did have mould on the ceiling. (Somebody forgot to air it out after the last trip evidently.) Again we forgot to bring a sufficient number of pegs so we pilfered Wards … I mean, we made pegs out of random branches we found on the ground of course. With our knives.

After we finally managed to put up the tent, we went for a "quick" acclimatisation walk of 8 km – nothing too long of course but when we returned, we returned as broken souls.
It hadn’t been too fun you see, apart from the recollection of the greatest songs from the 90’s – including the ENTIRE Backstreet Boys back catalogue and the sound of Steps- we were literally broken.

We had cuts from falling over, we’d encountered near death experiences from almost falling down steep ravine (that was Zoë), we’d met some cows – panicked just a liiittle bit- and, had been attacked by dogs. Now THAT’S the D of E we remembered!

Plus poor Hollis had left a few areas of the countryside covered in her lunch. That she had eaten two hours earlier.
And she fell down the hill too.
Poor, poor Hollis.

ANyway, back at the campsite, we prepared dinner before *drum roll please* FONDUE TIME!
Much tastier than last time, we had melted chocolate, marshmallows, mini marshmallows, rich tea biscuits and did I mention? LOTS of melted chocolate!

Seriously, there is nothing quite better than a triple layered rich tea sandwich with marshmallows and melted chocolate in between. Mmmm.

And then as the chocolate became of a not so edible texture, Greenie and Zoë were left to do with it as they wished. Funnily enough, there was a large "dog turd" at the gates the following morning. Ahhh that trick never gets old.

We passed the night in extreme pain as our bodies had not yet adjusted from the softness of our beds at home, to the hardness of the cold ground underneath and, at various intervals in the early mornings, some kind of animal would screech in a vague attempt at a mating call. We guessed it was a peacock but apparently it was the sound of a "grouse".
Bah, grouse smouse, we KNOW what a peacock sounds like!