Whenever I write that nothing is really going on, something crazy happens. So guess what? Something crazy happened. I just joined a group of scouts called the Rover scouts, it's for people over 16. I went to a meeting monday, and then I went to one friday where we played reball (like paintball but with without paint, haha). After we were done playing reball, the other scouts told that to be accepted into the Rover scouts you have to go on a secret mission. They also told me that there were three other guys who were doing going out on a mission tonight, and that if I wanted to, I could join them. So I did.
So I picked up my sleeping bag at home, and put some woolen underwear on. This is woolen underwear. Some might say that they're the ugliest clothes ever designed. They're very tight, and, well, here's a picture:
That's not me. We had a camera on the trip, the only pictures we took were ones when we were in our sleeping bags with only our noses poking out, or of the sky and the lake we slept next to. Basically everything that you didn't have to get out of your sleeping bag to take a picture of, haha.
So about this mission. They dropped me and the three 16 year old guys that I was going with, off at the end of some little bitty road in the middle of nowheres. This was around 12.30 at night. We got a map and a route we were supposed to follow. Oh, and did I mention that it was pitch black outside, and even with headlights, it was hard to see more than maybe eight feet in front of you, there was about 40 degrees fahrenheit out, and ofcourse it rained (and even sleeted some) the whole night. So around one in the morning, we started walking. There was no trail or path. Through swamps, up mountains and steep hills, down mountains and steep hills, and the going down part was almost worse than climbing up because everything was so wet and slippery. So we walked and walked, I had a backpack that was about 15 lbs, and it got heavier and heavier as it got more and more wet. At about 5.30 in the morning, as we were standing in the middle of a swamp, all I wanted to to was to just sit down and cry my eyes out. I was physically exhausted, I was soaked to the skin, and I had bad blisters on both feet. Well, I kept going. And 10 minutes later we found a road! A real road with asphalt! By then we had only walked a third of the route, so we figured we'd never get there in time, so we decided to find somewhere to camp to get some rest. So we walked along the road, well actually we walked in the middle of the road, the place was deserted. We walked past three houses, until we came upon this old barrack. It looked like something off a scary movie, so we werent too psyched about sleeping in there. So we camped out at a little parking lot, we had a tarpaulin, so we used that to build a tent-ish thingy to protect ourselves from the rain. We had to sleep all huddled together to keep warm. Me and three 16-year old guys that I'd met for the first time that same day. It went pretty well, I kept waking up from the sound of my own teeth chattering, but other than that it was great. We slept, or atleast relaxed from about 6 to 10 in the morning.
We had gotten a kvikk lunsj (the norwegian version of a kit kat-bar), which was the only food we had with us, so we shared that for breakfast. We called the guy that had planned our trip to say that we weren't able to make it in time, he told us that he'd never expected us to make it there anyways, so he gave us another route to follow. I had to summon all the motivation I had left in me to get out of my somewhat warm sleeping bag to put on my wet clothes, and keep on walking. For the first quarter of a mile, my toes were so frozen I could have swore they were about to break and fall off. We hadn't even walked a mile before we saw a bone, then another couple of bones, and then a skull, lying on the path. I'm guessing it was a sheep. So we must have slept not even a mile away from something that was so big it could kill sheep. It was so much easier walking in daylight, and we even had a trailto follow for the most part! There is such a HUGE difference between walking on a tiny trail and walking with no trail. Speaking of HUGE, this is what met us when we were about halfway to our goal saturday.
Yeah, and they were standing maybe 10 feet from the passage we had to go through. And they had a baby calf, which means they're more likely to attack. But we got past them. And we reached our goal. After 3,5 hours of walking. And guess how far we had walked that day? About three miles. We didn't walk slow, but the terrain did impede our speed by quite a lot, all those darned swamps and mountains! And also, I was with three boys scouts, and from time to time they were like "Hey lets go up on that hill so we can get a better view of things", I just wanted to yell "Dude! It's pitch black outside, how is it going to make any difference if we stand here or on some damned hill????"And the night, friday night when we had walked for 5 hours straight, we'd only walked 6 miles. When we got to that parking lot that was our final goal, I was so relieved, so tired, so hungry, but most of all so proud of myself! I wanted to quit quite a few times, but I stuck it out! It took all the strenght and energy I had in me, so when I got home, I slept for 14 hours straight, and then I had to go to work. But I got through it all!
Did you know that it's possible to get blisters under the sole of your foot?
