That was a pretty good day

The final installment, this is Mark's.  I added a picture (complete with heart because that's how it is saved in my photos) from approximately that time.  Just so you could see the little cherub.

Warning! The following contains an irresponsible scout story. Keep out of reach of any young men prone to bad ideas.

It started with the government shutdown right before our 11 year old scout camp. Our troop had decided to camp at Verlot National Forest, which didn’t work because the government had shut down, and the camp there was closed. Since we had driven an hour already, we decided to drive on another few minutes and see if there were any other campsites. We found a small, unmarked campsite right on a cliff, and decided to camp. It was a nice place, and we thought we would come back some time.

Fast forward a few months. We had decided to go to the exact same campsite, and we set up camp, ready to get a good night's sleep for our five mile hike the day after. But we never had a good night's sleep. Nobody in our tent slept at all that night. The three of us had unanimously decided to make a bad decision, and pull an all nighter. To be completely honest you probably couldn’t pick better people to stay up all night with. With me was Fletcher Pratt, with a large bag of Warheads Extreme Sour Candies to keep us awake, and Vance Fairbanks with a 2012 Guinness Book of World Records, for trivia purposes. I brought my winning sense of humor of course. We managed to stay up the entire night, though the memory is fuzzy from lack of sleep. Amazingly we were able to go on our hike without faltering. The same cannot be said for our ride back to Everett. I don’t know about Fletcher, but Vance and I were out cold the drive home. When I got back I laid down for a quick nap on the couch. When I woke up, we were going out to get dinner, and I had not only slept through half the day, but my family had watched the Belmont Stakes on TV, on the same couch I was sleeping on.

All this sounds rough, but in fact that was one of the greatest campouts I’ve ever gone on. We had a great time, talking, eating warheads and all around being irresponsible scouts. It was certainly a pretty good day.