MIC Day 2 - Monday

MIC Day 2


Discovered the disadvantage of having a member of the kitchen staff in your cabin – their alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m.! Thankfully I was able to get back to sleep, and woke up, went to breakfast. Eggs, cereal, and fairly unripe bananas.

After breakfast we headed down to the geo-HQ to finish getting ready for our first program group. It was great to walk in and see a canopy – it was pretty hot working in the sun yesterday. We were also happy to welcome a new member to the team – Patrick from Louisiana, who was on the media team but was asked to move to our area since one of our staffers didn’t show up. He at least had been geocaching a couple of times. Patrick, Tom, and Mike cut more flag labels while I worked on CITO containers. Attila and Alex took two of the GPS receivers out on our course, and finished in an hour. Pretty good for no prior geo-experience!

We were joined for a while by Scott, the MIC chaplain. He is a pretty neat guy, served as chaplain at the national jamboree and has served other camps in that capacity as well. Very down to earth and friendly, really makes an effort to get to know other people. While Scott was with us, there was a camp wide disaster drill – sirens, then we were to stay in place and security came around to see if we were all accounted for. Yep.

We finished set up by pulling out geocaching items to show the scouts, and displaying items such as my scouting geocoin collection. Also hid a few of the tricky containers – my log from Obvious? , my electrical outlet cache, and Michael’s rock with a container inside.

At 11:30ish, lunch was delivered. Lunch plan for the week is that our lunch is delivered to our program site along with the lunches for the 12:30 program group. Today that was our first group. Tortillas, turkey meat, cheese, carrot & celery sticks, fruit, cookies, chips, and Gatorade. We are to eat first, so that we can finish getting our area ready for that group. We had plenty of water but were asked to save our Gatorade bottles to refill with water if we hadn’t brought our own water bottles as styro cups were already running low.

Our first group showed up for lunch – we had scouts from Michigan, Georgia, Austria, and Honduras. At 12:30, I started out with a welcome, then about 10 minutes worth of an intro to geocaching, adapted for MIC. We then gave a GPSr to every two people, divided them into their patrols, gave them some instruction in how to use the GPSr, and they were off, with their geo staff guide. I had to stay back for this first round as somebody needed to “mind the store” so to speak. While everyone was gone I worked on CITO containers some more, I actually used up all the bags that I’d brought so we’ll see if we run out of containers. We have a quantity of MiGO CITO containers that we could replace the labels with MIC labels or just hand out as is. We’ll see. Not so many took them as I thought would.

When each group came back to geo HQ, they still had one more cache to find, then were able to get the American flag sticker to complete their set. During the remainder of their time, they could look at the displays and ask questions. Three out of four groups came back with very little time to do so, though. Several of the scouts from Honduras had brought trade items, not sure if because of geocaching or they just liked to trade. So since I had brought some patches with me, I traded with many of them. I now have several scenic Honduras keychains and magnets. When I returned, my two Honduran cabin mates were “home” and they were able to tell me more about what I had traded for. The scenes painted on several magnets were representative of a typical Honduran village. Another keychain was a mini sandal with inscription on the back which (in English) said “remembrance from Daniel.”

Second group came. On their heels came one of the camp commissioners to let everyone know that the well pump which serves most of the camp was broken so water was unusable. So dinner would be together at the dining hall instead of in their campsites. Ok fine. I started my geo-introduction and was interrupted by the SPL, who announced he’d just been told that the camp had declared a heat emergency and that programs were shutting down for the afternoon. So that was that, so we thought.

After securing our area, we started walking toward the internet café area. Tom and I were able to access email, although very slow it was nice to be able to check. Went to the air conditioned trading post afterward where we ran into Bruce, the head of the camporee. Very nice older guy, BTW. Working very hard to pull together something he really believes in, for the fifth time. He assured us during our conversation that program had not been shut down…not sure where the miscommunication was between the SPL and someone, but clearly he’d been misinformed.

Went back to the dining hall to get ready for our 5 pm dinner (staff was to be first, then the participants staggered for the next hour.) Tom and I were recruited to be servers, so we went into the dining hall and I got to serve vanilla pudding, paired with Scott the chaplain who served the chocolate pudding. We had fun doing a tedious job.

After dinner was open program time. We’d previously made the decision to not open geocaching tonight as we weren’t ready for anything else besides what they will be doing during program time, and to do that twice, or before their session, wouldn’t be any fun. So we had free time! Since it was so hot and I was so sticky, opted to head for the waterfront. Since I didn’t have an opportunity to take a BSA swim test, I was relegated to the beginner area. Got to be swim buddies with a young scouter from Austria, and we got to share the beginner area with a bunch of twelve year oldish scouts that were intent on recreating a mud war. That got old fast for me, so got out and headed back to the cabin. Still pretty warm in there so I headed for the dock by the dining hall and got to have some nice conversations with several people as we watched the sun set.

Looking forward to another fun day tomorrow, though hope it’s not quite so hot!