Silver DofE Practice

We were told beforehand that we had to be dropped off at the campsite on Friday evening by 17:00. When I arrived, I saw the rest of my team pitched at the top of the field, uphill from the gate, and far away. So me and the person I was sharing a tent with decided to pitch in a more sheltered area that was closer to the gate. We put up our tent and then everyone was called over to the minibus for a briefing. In short, we were doing nothing else for the rest of the evening. So we went back to our tents, it started raining, and eventually, I went to sleep. One of the annoying things here is that by the gate, I had 4G on my phone, but in the tent? Nothing.

On Saturday morning, I woke up at about 05:00. I got dressed and ate breakfast, and then waited to be told what to do, although we knew we would be returning to the campsite in the evening, so didn't need to pack away tents. A few hours later, everyone was gathered and each group was assigned an instructor, and we were told it was basically a training day. My group had an instructor whose words were 'It's your day, I'll follow you'. We didn't learn much. Anyway, we found a decent loop nearby, navigated a few footpath closures apparently caused by dirtbikes ripping up the paths and got back to the campsite about an hour and a half early. There was intermittent rain while we waited for the others to get back, and then we were told we had to fill in route cards for our walk the next day, although we were given a route already, we just had to copy it onto our maps. I did that with help from one or two other members of the group (there are 7 of us in total) and then went and cooked tea. We were also told we had to have left the campsite by 8 the next morning. After that, I hung around in the gazebo that the staff had brought, and talked with some people, before heading off to bed.

On the Sunday, the person I was sharing a tent with woke up at 04:30 and got up, so I did the same. I got some cool pictures of the landscape, and then started packing all my stuff away. The other tents from our team were open with people walking around by 05:30. My tent was down by 06:30, and then I had to wait around for a while. Eventually, by 08:40, the rest of our team was ready, and we headed off as the third team of four to leave. The walk was the same one we had done for Bronze DofE practice, so we did it mostly from memory and then reached the finish point about 3 hours before we had planned. My group got their first, and I got an ice-cream, before getting picked up by my parents.