Cooking at Camp
I grabbed these few images when I went to camp with my son. I enjoyed spending time with him. Things didn’t go exactly as I had planned. Lissa put together a great dinner for us to make. I didn’t bring a stove, or anything, I was planning to build a simple fire to do our cooking. When we arrived they said they already had 2 fires going, but that we weren’t allowed to start our own. We were welcome to use the fire they had going to cook if we wanted to. We were going to be cooking sausage, eggs, and hash browns in a simple cast iron frying pan. I went over and found their fire. It was built in a concrete pipe the way many campsites do it now. This one was one of the deepest I’ve seen, over 2 feet deep for sure. The fire had been going for awhile, so it was pretty hot, too hot for me to stick my frying pan down on one of the logs and tend the cooking for sure. I looked around and found a log that was 2 feet long. I stood that log up in the fire ring, but it was still several inches below the ring. I grabbed another that was a little longer and was able to get it to stand about the same height as the concrete ring. I then balanced the frying pan between the log and the ring, and started trying to cook the sausage right away. Even though the fire was pretty hot, I was quite a ways above the heat, and the log my frying pan was resting on was blocking a lot of the heat. I tried to be patient and wait for the pan to warm up. Others came and started throwing their tin foil dinners in on the coals in the bottom. They would mix things up a bit, and cause ashes to float up toward my food. Of course that made me nervous too.
As they started to pull their cooked food out of the fire, and my sausage was still just starting to get a little warm, I got a bit nervous. I began looking for smaller sticks that I could put between the concrete ring and the log holding up my frying pan. While the camp had a pretty good supply of logs to through on the fire, they didn’t have any kindling (other than cardboard) anywhere in sight. I started pulling a dead thorny bush apart to have something to help get that pan hot. It seemed to be working, so I kept at it finding whatever dried weed, or twig I could. I may have been a little embarrassed to have come so ill prepared for cooking my dinner. After burning every small mostly dry plant I could find the pan got hot, and we managed to get everything cooked wonderfully. The dinner tasted great, even if it took a little longer than everyone else. We may have shown up a few minutes late for the flag ceremony, but it was well worth it.
Classes
The other surprise for me was that the boys spent almost the entire camp in classes. This place has BB guns, and bows and arrows. They have some floating rafts that would allow you to get out on the pond, and a rock climbing wall. They even have a slack line. Did the boys ever have a station that took advantage of any of those things? Of course not, they had many achievements to pass off. At least a couple of the classes were a bit interesting. In one class they were taught how to make fire. Isn’t that convenient, now that we have suffered cooking our dinner on the wrong kind of fire, they were letting the boys build their own small little fires to learn how. I didn’t find the humor in that at the time. I was just glad they were getting to do something they found interesting and fun.
Reflection on the Pond
One of the classes they went to talked all about water safety. They learned to Reach, Throw, Row and Go. They also learned about the buddy system, and life jackets and such. Did they get to touch any water the whole time we were there? No way. After the class on water safety that was held right next to this pond (that the boys all wanted to jump in) I went over and took a few photos. The lighting wasn’t great, but I was able to capture a decent reflection of the vegetation. Although I think I like the shots where I added the path that ran along the edge of the water best. I couldn’t find a position that allowed me to capture both the path and the reflection. I suppose I could try and and use photoshop, but that isn’t really my thing.
