A blog about camping.

 Hello. Mr Yubblesworth here, spouse to the lovely and loveable redhead and all round fabulous person, Mrs Yub. She has asked me to write a blog about the recent camping trip the childers and I went on.

He'll write that blog. I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.

The trip began several days before we left with the knowledge I was about to go camping with three children. Alone in that responsibility. With no help. No spouse to lean on. Just me. By myself. ARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH.

It got better. A day before we left I was told that two other children were coming as well, also to be in my charge. Noescapenoescapenoescape sang the anxiety elves in my head, presumably hunched into balls and weeping while doing so.
 Thus I was of no help when it came to packing. My charming and altogether altogether wife did that with minimal input from me. My only duty was checking the camp gear to see if it was in serviceable shape. I had dim memories of the tent being rather not serviceable, but I began to put it up in the backyard anyway.
Quickly the fault was found, but as for the fix, I had none. After ringing the Person Responsible For This Camping Nonsense aka Paul, we had a plan, but the results wouldn't be known until the day I would be depending on said tent for one of life's necessities, namely shelter. Only by the grace supplied by my good friend Jesus did I not become a gibbering squeaking mass of uselessness.

The sun rose on Sunday through a haze of rain clouds. At one point I saw lightning crack across the sky. During church, it rained and hailed while the wind buffeted and howled. Knowing that surrender was not an option and I was due to go camping mere hours hence, I promptly fell asleep for the entirety of the sermon. When I awoke at the end of church, Paul was yet to arrive to guide us to our camping spot. I spent a good little while assuring the children [and myself] that everything would be fine. With the eventual arrival of our guide we began our journey!

Our camp site was a farm outside of Rosedale, a small town about 30 minutes out of Traralgon. All of that translates into fairly remote. It abounds with goats, goats surround the house and most of the grounds of it. There are in fact so many goats when you enter onto the farm grounds that neither Malachi nor I, the two people of our small section of the total camping party to hold cameras, completely and utterly did no photographic documenting of them, such was was their abundance. There were really quite a lot of them. They frolicked in the sun, lazed idly under trees, munched grass near broken farm equipment, climbed over that same broken farm equipment or merely decided sitting on someone's car was comfortable. Running with the plethora of goats were two llamas of which photographs were taken.

See! It's a llama!

I assured the panicking children we were not to camp surrounded by the bleating of goats, but further onto the property. And further we did go, but not before the children found a distressed goat caught in a fence. We promptly took absolutely no photographs of it. After that and a small amount of investigation we shifted the wire that had closed in to ensnare the poor animal and firmly but carefully manoeuvred the horns out.

Another few minutes of cautious driving, we had arrived at the point I could take the car no further. The spring water that was to serve as our drinking water also served to make the camp site something of an island, encircling it with reedy marsh in three directions and with a small river on the fourth. The road in was traversable barring the gigantic muddy hole that made it completely not traversable at all. After throwing everything into Paul's 4WD the final 250m to the camp site was made. It is a beautiful spot, perfect for camping, so the first thing we did was not take photographs. Then began the Herculean task of assembling the Tent. I capitalise the foremost T in Tent in the same manner as people are wont to capitalise the leading A in Antichrist. Paul's fix worked, but the Tent was quite sure it was quite happy snuggled in its bag and was not at all ready to be all up and protective today thankyou.  I have two tents, one is small and brown and it behaves quite nicely. It goes up quite easily and continues to stay so until you take it down again.  The other, the aforementioned Tent...before I was done putting it up I knew this was the last time I would ever do so. I was dreaming up creative ways of making the Tent something other than a Tent before the third tent pole had gone in. Many of these scenarios involved me never taking it down again except through the agency of fire. Merry thoughts of material shrivelling and fibreglass poles melting in the heat of a blazing camp fire danced in my head. Only the potential wrath of my wife stopped me from burning it were it eventually stood. The word stood is used so incredibly loosely here, entire herds of buffalo could stampede thought it and the dust raised wouldn't touch the boundaries. Perhaps I should be slightly more accurate and say slumped. I have photographic evidence.

A slumping tent being rejected by its more upright peers.

That blue and orange saggy sack is the Tent. It did its job so poorly that Hadassah climbed out of bed each night and sat by the fire in the wee small hours because of the rain and/or dew making the Tent sag further and making her wet and uncomfortable. I discovered her the second night up at three am and hustled her in between Phebe and me in the little brown tent...

Sunday night around the fire, as most camps do, featured a sing along. The music could not be contained in mere song and broke forth into an impromptu drumming circle. I filmed it as someone has to do the dirty work and capture these moments of embarrassment and show them to the world. Journalism! :P 

Dawn broke on Monday with some epic sleeping in by all parties sans Dassah and myself. Most of the male population of the camp had gone looking for a suitable kangaroo for the pot the previous night,  Monday night's dinner was to be Roo Stew and it was one of the reasons I'd decided it was worth sleeping rough. We have exactly five foam camping mattresses and I was hosting five children, so I made do with two blankets folded lengthwise twice. It was comfortable enough for the duration of our stay.  I greeted each bleary eyed camper in turn, whilst sipping my bush coffee. Bush coffee is merely ground coffee beans and boiled on the fire together and then strained through a tea towel, in case you wondered. Most of the children surfaced before any other adult, as they were rather excited. The day promised rides on the four wheeled motorcycle and shooting a .22 calibre rifle. Malachi could scarcely contain himself when Paul, the owner of both pieces of joy giving equipment surfaced. One of the party, a young adult who runs our youth group, was still snoring quite audibly at nine, so Tomuto began to make loud noises near his tent. Below are a host of photographs of people using firearms and riding the quad bike. Of particular note is Phebe, who begged for a chance to be like her siblings and fire the gun, and Malachi who hit the target quite close to the centre on his second attempt.
The children all ran back and forth between the target and the quad after each shot, much to my approval as I knew they were would tire early as a result.

As night approached, so too did my anticipation for the meal ahead: Roo Stew!

The only fresher 'roo is the sort hopping around.

I'd eaten it before, the last time I camped on the goat farm. Thus I knew exactly how tasty it was. It was a deciding factor in staying on that night rather than upping stakes and burning the Tent. 

As the preparation for the stew was underway, the adult males of the camp set to a task. The last time I was there we made a bench on which to prepare various things, using nothing but a chainsaw, a recently felled tree [both of those things previously unrelated] and our own strength. The bench was still there upon our return and had proven rather handy this particular camp.  The felled tree we had used for the bench was result of a flood. That flood had also inconveniently dumped another tree in the camp swimming hole, so we set to clearing it as summer is coming and swimming is good. The children upon hearing the news we were set upon this task immediately changed into swimming gear, as if we were going to simply lift the tree out using our telekinetic mind powers. Over the coming hours I fielded multiple juvenile queries as to the status of the job with a same answer: You swim when we're done. 

The process was long, involving cutting the fallen tree into large pieces and towing it away with a 4WD.  This sort of thing can be enjoyable, like a logic puzzle. It also results in more than a few moments of hilarity. The aforementioned young snooze hound and youth leader aka Daniel tried to ride a smaller log as one would a skateboard. Videographic evidence preseneted as exhibit Rather Silly.

Finally the task done, we sent a youth into the water to look for submerged tree parts and upon getting an all clear, we started introducing the children to the rope swing. Presenting Malachi, for your viewing pleasure, in "How Cold is the Water?'

 He decided it was cold enough to not go back in at all, ever. Unfortunately, shortly after Malachi's heroic swing, Haddassh tried it. She did not keep adequate tension on the rope and face planted just before the water on those same sticks Malachi was complaining about under his feet. She was lucky her lack of listening to the instructing adults garnered her only hurt pride and some pretty epic scratches. No photographs were taken. No-one caught any of it on film. There are those who thought the greater tragedy was the lack of visual documentation, rather than the accident itself.....but not me. No. Other people. Not me.
  

After all novelty of a rope swing was exhausted, we were happy to sit down to a bowl of roo stew. It had spent four hours in the camp oven surrounded by hot coals and was ready to eat, but Paul had disappeared. He'd gone for a walk and didn't return for another half an hour much to the displeasure of rumbling young tummies and exhausted adult ears. For almost the entirety of that 30 minutes, I heard every variation of query as to where Mr. Paul had gone.  Thus where he did return and began serving up his stew, bowls of it disappeared faster than the kangaroo had ever moved in life.  Once again, it proved delicious.

As the sun sank, so did the eyelids of my youngest daughter. Thus I elected to stay behind with her sleeping personage when the idea of a night bush walk was presented to the remaining children. I received word upon their return that much fauna was spotted, mostly wombats and possums, which everybody was very careful not to take photographs of.  The children, if not before than definitely after the walk, were plum tuckered out. Faster than the stew had disappeared had they prepared themselves for bed and the camp was asleep.


Tuesday morning saw nothing left to do but break camp, but not before the thrills of more quad bike rides. Then it was all peg pulling and tent folding. I was sorely tempted to put a torch to my nylon nemesis, but I settled for not caring about how it went away, swearing it would never again be assembled. As if to signify that was perfectly fine by it, three shock cords within the tent poles snapped and many of the tent pegs were so bent as to be unusable in the future. Every last scrap of rubbish burnt, wood stacked for future fires and fire extinguished, we were ready to leave. Much to my great pleasure, all children were asleep ten minutes into the trip home!