You may have noticed by now I’m a bit of a fan of the Rebel badges. Last week I talked about how I was apparently starting my Wild Swimmer badge, I’ve previously talked about Stargazer and Water Sports and Adventurer and I probably haven’t mentioned Community Service, Craft, Critic, My Brand, Linguist or Reader. Well, this one is Explorer, which is kind of the walking badge of the current batch.
Explorer is going to be a big one. There are nine clauses to do. I can easily cross off several, about using maps and hiking gear but I also have to hike regularly (and I don’t think my 2.3km walks from my front door every day count as hiking), do a 10 mile hike, a challenging day trip that will probably involve a 20 mile hike (I don’t know if I’ve ever done 20 miles in a single day! That will be a challenge.) and take part in an organised event. The overnight adventure I’m about to talk about is for another clause, which reads:
Plan an overnight adventure where you spend at least one night in a tent
Ok. That’s the least challenging of the six actual challenging clauses. My initial plan was a kind of DofE-lite expedition, where I booked a campsite in Purbeck and I would park/be dropped off about 10km away and walk to it. But it turns out I’m just not that lightweight kind of packer. I do have a small one-man tent and I could squeeze it into my bag. But last year, I went camping on Brownsea Island, where I had to carry my stuff a mile from the jetty to the campsite and without a tent, I still had a 65l backpack and a separate smaller bag that I hung over my neck and that was exhausting enough. I will never be the backpacker type.
So I had another look at “adventure”. Ok. I would go down to Studland and do a kayak trip, or maybe a SUP one, since I’ve only done that a couple of times before. A ride on the steam train is always an adventure. A long hike across the hills. That was really as far as I’d got by Thursday, the night before I set off.
I couldn’t quite make things add up. By then, I was wanting to do my wild swim which would be at 5pm but I also needed to check in at the campsite between 12 and 6. I’d have to do it before swimming but then that didn’t leave time for the long hike. Even if I check in at 12 on the dot, there’s not that much hike I can fit in before I set off for the sea. There’s not really time to do it before either, not if I’m going to get that tent up. In hindsight, actually there was plenty of time but I was getting in such a tangle trying to put together an itinerary that I just couldn’t see it.
In the end, it rained on Friday morning and I spent the morning in Corfe doing a treasure trail towards my Codebreaker badge. Yes, it was quite the badge-work weekend. I printed it out because it’s easier to cross things off and it all got soaked, to the point that the wet paper tore and I couldn’t read my map properly. Those things look like they’re designed as half-term activities for kids but it was actually really hard! There were four clues I just never found – there were no red letters when I reached the road, I never found number 47 and I never found the place restored in 17-something. I forget what the last one was. It took me around the village and made me look closely at things I’d never looked at and in short, I’d absolutely do one of those trails again.
When I’d finished (“finished”), I went back to the village square, bought myself a Corfe Castle badge for my camp blanket and went into the castle. I’m a NT member so I can idly stroll in whenever I like. It was still damp and it was a bit overrun with schoolchildren. That’s the age when I guess your life circumstances are most open to learning about castles and killer queens and heroic women but it’s also the age when no one gives a flying anything. I wouldn’t have cared back then either. But when I went last year, I found it all fascinating. It was a hunting lodge for William the Conquerer and it got passed down the royal line and then sold off to friends and finished up in the hands of the Bankes family, who lost it in the Civil War when they were betrayed by one of their own household. A king of England was murdered, if not here where the dining room used to be, then in the village, by his step-mother, while he was still a teenager. That popped Aethelred the Unready on the throne and if he’d been older or more assertive, maybe the Danish kings wouldn’t have taken his throne out from underneath him and British history would have looked very different.
Anyway. By then it was getting on for midday and so I went off to my campsite, where I caused havoc by asking to upgrade to two nights instead of one. My plan had been literally an overnight adventure/expedition so one night but now it was becoming more of a mini adventurous holiday so two nights. It took about fifteen minutes to figure out how to move me so I could have a pitch for two nights, on this so-called “chockablock” campsite – it was certainly not full Friday night and I counted five empty pitches on my field alone on Saturday night.
Anyway, I eventually got put on Main Field, pitch 14 which was down the end, in front of the pond. It was a fairly huge pitch, far bigger than a little two-man tent and a small car really needed. I put the tent up, moved my stuff in, had lunch and then sat out in the shade, for the sun had come out by now. I read, I sewed badges on my blanket, I watched my neighbours move in. They also had a two-man tent, which was quite reassuring because everyone else on the site – or at least everyone within my sight – had either a caravan with an awning as big again, or a campervan. I’m accustomed to small sites where caravans are a small minority but I did later learn that if only a handful of campers are using tents, the toilets and showers are usually pretty empty.
It was a working farm. You had to be careful driving in because there were always geese and peacocks crossing the road. There were young cows in the barn between the campsite and the reception/oversized farm shop/garden centre. If there weren’t green netting fences dividing up the sites and tracks, I’d have realised a lot sooner that there were four goats just fifty yards from my tent. Millie and Mollie were white angoras. Mr Chips was a Golden Guernsey and Sausage was a long-eared Anglo-Nubian who would quite often come over for ear scritches and a handful of grass.
By 4pm, I realised it was a warm sunny afternoon, I had my kayaking stuff in my bag and I didn’t really have an excuse to not be brave and go and swim in the sea for the first time. I’ve already written the post about that. I returned full of glee and warmer than I’d expected and since there wasn’t really anywhere to leave my wetsuit, towel and swimsuit, I just left them in my Ikea bag in the car. They’d dry out in there if it was hot on Saturday and if they didn’t, I’d be home on Sunday morning and could wash and dry them properly.
I bought some fresh milk in a glass bottle from the dispenser outside the shop, because that will never not be wonderful, and made hot chocolate and then I sat outside and waited for the sun to go down far enough for me to start to see stars. Stargazing used to be easy. I’d just go for a walk after work. Now I have to wait until 10pm and I’m not often outside at that hour these days. The sky was absolutely clear and gradually, more and more stars appeared. Vega, right opposite my tent. Arcturus above me to my right. Spica, a new one on me, below that. Castor and Pollux peeking through the trees behind my tent. Polaris, right above my head. Stars I’d not seen in months and new ones I didn’t know so well.
On Saturday I decided to forego the long walk in favour of a walk down to Corfe to get the steam train to Swanage. Norden is just down the road whereas the station at Corfe is more than 2km away. The walk there and back would be an adequate distance for my daily walk plus it’s more adventurous to pick your way through the woods and around the hills to get to the station. It turns out if you buy a ticket from Corfe to Swanage and the first train happens to be going to the terminus at Norden, they’re happy – they actively encourage you! – for you to get the train to Norden and then back to Corfe for free. It’s only an extra five minutes of steam train ride but I’ll take what I get.
So we chuffed up to Norden and I took photos of the locomotive changing ends – it pulls forward to Norden, then it’s uncoupled and it chuffs back to the other ends and pulls backwards to Swanage where it changes end again so it’s ready to pull forwards again. It made me panic a few times. I stood on the platform, camera in hand, checking my watch every minute or so. You’re not going to miss the train. The train can’t go until the locomotive gets here and it’s not here.
It’s only a short ride to Swanage, barely twenty minutes. Everyone crams into the front end but I prefer the back – when you go around curved bits of track, you can see the loco in front of you, whereas you can’t really see it from up close. You also get less ash and filth in your eyes if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction.
In Swanage, I walked along the seafront, walked out on the pier, watched a sailing lesson, watched the lifeboat go out and head west, had lunch at a cafe on the pier and then popped into Chococo for my usual bag of chocolate dinosaurs and pirate coins. Last stop: the haberdashery for some clips for something I’ve hopefully made by the time this is published, and the bookshop because one book for two nights was too optimistic. Then I went to catch the train.
This was its lunch break. It had arrived at 12: 22 and wouldn’t be departing until 13:30. I sat at the end of the platform and admired the huge hot steamy thing gently chuffing in the sun. I watched Men of a Certain Age approach and look at it in interest and I watched the driver and the fireman say “Do you want to jump up? Come on in and take a look at the cab!” In the end, I had to go and ask “Can I jump up too?” to get my “Of course! Hop up!”.
Oh, this was another adventure. I’ve seen the cabs of steam trains at museums but never a “live” one and never while the fire was lit. It was hot! It’s a huge fire, like the jaws of hell, and it’s so hot in there. There’s just hundreds of iron and brass levers and handles and gauges and I realised I know nothing about steam locos. The driver asked if I’d like a photo in the driver’s seat – of course! – and I asked what I can put my hand on to make it look like I’m driving.
He hesitated. “Umm… ok… you can put your hand – don’t do anything! – you can put your hand here, I guess….” This is the regulator. It lets steam into the workings – it’s basically the accelator. I don’t know what steam trains have in the way of handbrakes. If I’d pushed or pulled or squeezed that handle, might the train have started moving? But I’m not stupid. I rested my hand on the regulator and didn’t do anything. The effect of “I’m driving!” was slightly spoiled by having to look at the camera but on the other hand, I’m not sure how I’d see where I was going from that seat anyway.
We chuffed back to Corfe and I disembarked so I could take photos of the train moving away from the platform with the loco pointing in the right direction. Then I walked my 2.5km back to the campsite and settled in for the afternoon.
Yes, I’d had a wild swim and a steam train ride and been in the cab and I’d definitely fulfilled the criteria “plan an overnight adventure where you spend one night in a tent”. I bought some chocolate milk from the dispenser (you get a shot of syrup which fills at least 15% of your bottle and then you try to fit the usually correct litre/half litre into the bottle that’s already got liquid in and of course it overflows and makes a mess!) and waited for the stars to come out again. All my life those stars have been up there and my interest in them has been minimal and yet they’re a huge bit of nature and the outdoors. It’s like spending your entire life not noticing trees or animals. Having first noticed them in winter, I’m adapting to the fact that a lot of my old friends aren’t visible in summer. Orion and Sirius didn’t poke their heads above the horizon all weekend (or not when I was looking, anyway) and Altair, who I always think of as a twin to Vega, didn’t come up either.
I didn’t plan to be at the 9.30 swim on Sunday morning but tents are both bright and hot in the morning, whatever the weather is up to, and by 7am I was awake. I had breakfast and I started packing and trying to get my swimming stuff dry – it turned out that roasting in my car under Saturday’s sun had done nothing to dry it and the Ikea bag was not waterproof and everything in the back seat was now wet. I dried the dew off the tent and shoved it all in the car and discovered it was 9.05am. I had time, just about, to get to the beach. And so my adventurous weekend ended with a second sea swim. Yes, I could cross off that clause in all good conscience, and a couple of clauses from other badges.
I don’t know when the post/s will come, but as of this being published, I’m in a tent by a lake on Exmoor for my Camper badge and that’s going to be adventurous because that’s basically a long weekend of watersports in a Dark Sky area so I’m very excited. And it’ll be my big 4-man tent too, so I’ll have my full kitchen out!