Oshkosh Day 4

Last night (Wednesday) Mrs. G let us stay up a little longer so we could interact with some other pathfinders. For some reason that made Esther "go wild" full of energy. She hid in a dark corner and as soon as anyone would walk by, she would jump in front of them asking them 1) What is your name? and 2) where are you from? This made people so startled that it was actually funny...Even the adults were waiting to see people's reactions.

Finally it was time to go to bed. All the generators were supposed to be off and everyone needed to be inside their campsite (and Pr. Bob came to inspect every site, to be sure everyone was in compliance) so we did, brushed our teeth and went to bed.

We got up around 7am. We were hungry and our wonderful cooks were ready with breakfast. Today is going to be an even more special day. Our club planned to go canoeing!!! Most of us have never done that we were actually looking forward that. The weather couldn't be more perfect, about 78F and plenty of sun.

At 9am we put our sun screen protection on and drove about 1 hr to "New London".

Once there we got ready, jumped into a van with 7 canoes behind it in a trailer, and drove another 30 minutes to our "launching place" (not before the mandatory picture and the necessary safety instructions in front of the van). It was a lot of fun. At the last minute Mrs. G decided to send her camera back with the driver. Good thing because at one point or another every canoe tips over and we did end up in the water!

The water was shallow in most places, some no more than 2 feet and nice and refreshing. At times we had some rapids but most of the time it was nice, calm and relaxing.

After the 4 hour trip we were hungry. Thank God our cooks sent us away with sack lunches (a veggie sandwich, a bag of chips, granola bar and an apple) delicious!

We had to return pretty fast because we had to leave about 45 minutes after we got into camp for the evening program. When we got to our campsite dinner was ready (burritos) so we packed another sack, walked to the program place, sat down and ate...(yup, everyone was looking at us with hungry faces!)

Now the bad news, we all are getting sick, so Mr. G went to Walmart and got us "vitamin C" that we all are going to take tonite.

Because of the offsite activity today, we were not able to trade any pins today, but we have gotten some really cool ones. Adam got almost a complete set of the Indianapolis pins, these are very special-each one has a car and if you get the 5 pins the conference will give you #6 with a gold car. Matthew got almost all the crowns pins. There are several and he is missing only 2, the purple and the rainbow and Kenton got all the guitars. Mr. G got a very special one in chinese (he said that it is special but no one knows what it says.)

We hope you are following the nightly program on the Hope Channel website. Just in case, the website is http://www.hopetv.org/ and the program starts at 5pm (Pacific Time).

As usual we posted more pictures in facebook ( www.facebook.com/venturasda) hopefully you are following us there.

Time to go to sleep...God willing, we will post a blog tomorrow while we are getting to the end o of the camporee. Goodnight!