The Scenic disaster!

It was October the 15^th, my friend Ella’s birthday. Any normal person would think we were going out for a nice meal, but no, no we were going on our first ever duke of Edinburgh expedition. This is when you walk a treacherous ten kilometres a day, for two days with a nice spot of camping overnight in a field; yes a random field in the middle of nowhere.

We started off walking through scenic forests and luscious green fields. Wildlife was crawling from everywhere. Give or take an hour and the green fields, green grass and green bushes became boring. Give another five hours and any sign of human life was beyond excitement. Every hour or so we would have a ten minute break where we would literally stop in our tracks and lie on a muddy grass verge, a tree stump or a log, basically anything that wasn't the floor. We would take off our ridiculously heavy bags that were nearly as big as us, and just pray that magically we were going to arrive at a camp site.

When we were first given our bags we thought we would never fill them, but I had a struggle to keep all my stuff in. We also noticed a bright orange cover which went over the bag for if it got dark or rained. Little did we realise that those covers would become incredibly handy when we were walking up a steep hill, surrounded by more steep hills, while wind and rain was being thrown at us. No not only were our legs hurting, we were now drenched, with a pretty slim chance of drying off any time soon. After about eight hours we finally reached our camp site, this was a relief. After about half an hour we had put up our tent. When we stood back and looked at this microscopic tent that you practically had to crawl into, and were disheartened to say the least.

We woke up the next day and within an hour we were off again in search for the finish line. Sound’s so easy doesn't it? Our leader had told us to be very careful we didn't miss a specific bridle path or we would get lost.

The path that was meant to be there wasn't, so we sat and had a rethink. All we could see was a bunch of painful stinging nettles that looked like a path that would lead somewhere. We thought that we would try and get down there. Bad mistake. One girl named Hope went first and as she took one step into the squelching muddy bog and she was stuck, she desperately tried to get out but she couldn't. Eventually she managed to climb out but her shoe was still stuck, so another girl tried to get the shoe, meaning she got stuck too and it just escalated from there until about three people were stuck, shoeless. We obviously had gone wrong. We were completely lost In the middle of the Cotswolds, three people had no shoes, and we couldn't get hold of the leader because there was no phone signal. About two hours later we miraculously got hold of the leader and he said we would have to be picked up by a minibus, because we were two hours from finishing and it was already late. This silly mistake meant we had failed but luckily this was only the practice expedition.