Class Camping Trip Disaster

When I was in 7th grade, I lived in Lithuania. I went to an international school there. I think it was the week before the last week of school, and I was gonna go on a two day camping trip with my class.

The first part was the funniest. We had to kayak for 15 kilometers to were we would get off and walk to the camping site. Every two people would have one kayak. My buddy Ignas and I went together. I think we were something like a quarter of the way down the river (each boat was spread out by a lot, so we were alone) when the current started to pick up. At one point, the river forked into two sections, then merged back together after about 5 meters. We wound up going to the left, where there was a downed tree in the way. Some how I managed to stick my arm out in time to catch the boat (I was in front). We almost capsized. And then Ignas started helping out and we managed to squeeze through a small opening in the tree. Sure we got scratched, but as we learned later, we got lucky. Everybody, including the teachers, had failed to keep from capsizing. Ignas and I were the only ones who didn't tip our boat over.

So we wound up having to do most of the work when we stoped for lunch, and that turned out to be a disaster. A lot of the food was wet and couldn't be used. The tripod for hanging the pot on took several different tries before we succeeded. And then we couldn't get the fire started for another thirty minutes. But when we did, the food we cooked wasn't that bad.

And then came the second part of the kayak trip. Everyone gave us quite a bit of their stuff, 'cause of course, they didn't want it getting wet again. We were loading this onto our boat, and then Ignas was like, "Dude! Stop!" Apparently the entire back of the boat was under the water because of the weight. So we unloaded a bit of the stuff and distributed it out to other duos. Ignas wound up sitting on a wet seat for the rest of the trip.

And then we had to do the land part, which included having to split into random groups of three (I was paired with two girls from my class), and we had to zip-line across a river and two cliffs. They weren't that tall, though, only about 10, 15 feet high. But still, everyone freaked the crap out. And one person from another group dropped the remaining food rations into the river. And then I had to carry one girl who had "sprained" her ankle for two and a half kilometers.

Never again.