I Am A Polar Bear

Part two of Rebel Summer Camp! If you don’t know what it is, go back and read the first part because I’m picking up on Sunday morning with no further explanation.

Sunday started with a hike down past the gladiator duel, through the woods, under the road and through a bit more woods until we got to the lake where we were dressed in buoyancy aids and helmets and sent out on the lake in pairs in pedal boats. It takes a moment to get the hang of the steering and I had to both steer and take photos because I’d brought my waterproof, floating GoPro for this very reason, and because my boating partner immediately steered us into the rope separating the non-boating part of the lake and we got stuck there. It was already hot, even at 9.30 in the morning, and there’s no shelter in the field with the lake, so between the heat and the physical requirement to pedal, we ran out of steam fairly quickly. We did enjoy it but we were hot, lazy and aware that our next activity was on the other side of the campsite.

The next activity was really chilled! Kibblestone is home to a farm, of a kind. It doesn’t produce anything apart from wool when the sheep are sheared for the heat, and there are only three sheep. It doesn’t make milk or cheese and the animals are living there as a sanctuary rather than being raised for meat. Its main purpose, for visitors, is wellness. We’d been offered several activities and gone for the Animals, Art & Stories option, where you look at the animal and then do a creative activity like clay modelling, sketching or writing. In fact, when we turned up, we were allowed to do whatever we liked, including just sitting in the enclosures with them. Kat tried to coax one of the large rabbits to sit in a hat long enough to take a photo for a Scavenger Hunt badge from 2023 (it refused), we visited the guinea pigs and the actual pigs but Nelson 1 enjoyed the sheep and goats the most. I forget what breed the sheep are but they’re huge with big black soft faces and they just love to be cuddles. The goats are pygmies and if offered a bucket of snacks, they’ll climb all over you to get at them. Several people, having discovered the farm, returned to it instead of going to timetabled activities over the rest of their weekend.

Next up was axe throwing, which I was excited about. I love to throw axes! Our instructor decided to assume that whatever any of us may have been previously taught was wrong, so we didn’t do anything he believed was unsafe on his range and so we started from the basics. First, we all threw some small axes. Not quite as small as angels, which are the little steel crosses, but similar in that they’ll stick in the target on most sides. That went ok for everyone except the visitor from Nelson 2 who joined us for some reason who simply couldn’t do it. Fine, said the instructor. From the way you’re throwing, I think you’ll do a lot better on the full-size axes

So we threw full-size axes! Again, I was pretty pleased with mine. I’m not Olympic prospect but I’ve had enough training and practice and I have enough understanding of target sports through teaching archery that I can generally manage to not disgrace myself. It feels good to throw a proper axe! Those big heavy steel heads really give it some weight and it feels very satisfactory to have that whirl through the air. The downside is that axes only stick in the target on the sharp side.

Because we had quite a big group and some people needed more coaching than others, axes overran into lunchtime. The trouble was that lunchtime was also time for the conga competition. One other thing the Rebel Badge Club has is the Rebel Cup, where about a hundred people compete to score points each month for their patrol, either by completing badges or doing bonus tasks. For the Cup, I’m in Rosa so any points go there, even though I’m Nelson for camp. The conga line is a Patrol competition for August so I’d have joined Rosa for it. But we overran on the presentations on Saturday night, so Charly moved the conga line to Sunday lunchtime. But what with axes overrunning and needing to get to the opposite side of the campsite for cheerleading straight after lunch and only having about 20 minutes to fuel up, I just didn’t have the time to go and join my patrol. It was later announced that Rosa won, so clearly they didn’t need me but I’ve felt kind of guilty ever since.

After lunch was cheerleading, which wasn’t so much cheerleading as a dance class with pompoms. It was very hot in the room where it was held so we made regular stops to wilt on the bench outside before going in to do it again and our instructor mercifully let our final all-the-way-through practice be our final performance, filmed by one of the Patrol who wasn’t taking part. I’m not great at this sort of thing but the instructors – we do it quite regularly at events, in different styles – are patient, repetitive and don’t regard it as the end of the world if you just stop and flap your hands because you’ve got lost or tired. There was only really one bit I struggled with, a forward march where I ended up on the wrong foot immediately before it and never mastered getting onto the right foot for it. The box step that led into the march back straightened me out but that march forward, never got it.

We had a nice quiet session after that, board games in the room below. I’m not great at board games, really, but I’m doing my Board Games badge for this quarter’s challenge and I either needed to play a game popular in the decade I was born or play a game published this year. Fortunately, the game Kathy put on the table proved to be out this year. It was complex enough that I might have given up otherwise and just used it as a chilled session to sit in the shade and watch other people playing. It was called Pack the Essentials and it’s about packing a suitcase with as many clothes and cats as possible, featuring a round of “what order to we go in?” on every round, rat tokens which can be used to turn clothes into cats, four colours of clothes and cats and to-do lists which are actually bonus challenges.

I more or less had the evening off. I’m not a member of either the Rainbow Rebels or the Spoonie Rebels – might have gone along if there had been a Rebel Readers meeting but I was quite happy to just go back to my tent and read and try to make some toast (camp toasters do not work, it turns out). I also skipped the foraging workshop because although mushrooms are a Rebel craze, I have zero interest. But alongside the murder mystery (too complicated last year; skipped it this year), there was another campfire. Well, we had wood to use up and there are always people who don’t fancy the official activity. It was a small quiet campfire with no singing, just people dropping in to cook a marshmallow, so that was a nice evening.

And at last we’re on Monday!

Monday started with crossbows – another target sport! Except the crossbows turned out to be the sort of small plastic ones meant for seven-year-olds, unbeknownst to our Chief Rebel, who’d booked everything. Actually, they’re quite accurate when you’ve figured out how to load the bolts properly, as long as you’ve got the one bow with the sight that stays on when you shoot it. However, one of our Patrol turned up feeling sick and later departed the range moving with purpose, eventually returning to her tent to not be seen for an hour. Love how the biggest emetophobe in camp ends up with the one person who gets food poisoning. Moral of the story: if you’re going to make pancakes on the Friday of the hottest weekend of the year, don’t leave those pancakes out until Monday.

We were down to seven or eight by the time we went over to teambuilding for our second activity. Last year, it was our first activity and it poured with rain, and half of last year’s Greta 2 hadn’t brought waterproofs, so a few of the team bonded wetly right at the start. This year, we were already a team. We built a Lego model using instructions relayed over walkie-talkies, we crossed a stream of lava on crates (I didn’t mention any of the actual realities of getting that close to lava, like the poison gas, the lava building up around and then on top of the crates or the craters melting or catching fire) and we retrieved dangerous objects from the middle of a circle using ropes. Official photographer Trina joined us for this one, so I’ll share one of the photos. I probably shouldn’t but Charly isn’t overly strict about how we use the official photos, as long as we don’t take it too far.

Our last proper activity was lawn games – mostly giant Jenga and giant Connect Four. I held my breath that my opponent didn’t notice I had three in a row and was about to add the fourth and when I did, we both made the astonishing discovery that I had five in a row, and we’d evidently both been oblivious to the fact that I’d already won before dropping in that last disc. We had a second medical incident in one morning within Nelson 1 Patrol during lawn games but Heather and a couple of others handled that while ordering the rest of us to “keep going, just keep playing”. If you’re not getting on with Connect Four, you’re effectively just gawping and that helps nobody, so we did.

Lunch, for me, was a quick snack before I packed up the tent. Because most of my stuff comes in bags – the food bag, the plate bag, the washing-up bag, the bits-and-pieces bag, the repair kit bag – it was pretty easy to pack up and dump by the fence and the tent isn’t difficult to take down despite its size. It doesn’t fit in its own bag so I have a one-size-fits-all bag that you just drop it on top of and wrap around it. If we’d been going to screenprinting and hadn’t done it two days ago, I’d barely have been late for it, even including fetching the car, loading all the stuff into it and returning to the car park.

So I had an hour of sitting in the sun reading a book before we went pond dipping, on a bench by the back door of the dining room, where I could admire the most recent screenprinted bags. Not all Rebels are creative but there’s a definite tendency towards it so some of them were quite incredibly. As for Nelson 1, there were only about six of us left by now. I’m pretty sure three of us had gone home – one went home Sunday morning, Kathy went after lunch and Heather vanished at some point, and a few other people were still getting ready to leave rather than coming for the last activity of the weekend. We were joined by someone who’d just come for the day, who wasn’t actually with us but had realised that Monday afternoon is a bit chaotic and there’s room for an extra at pretty much every activity. Monday is a really bad day to come just for the day – everyone’s tired, everyone’s skipping activities, no one’s got the energy or motivation left to to do the activities they do turn up to. I filled a tray with water for the pond dipping but when I didn’t immediately catch anything other than weed with the net, I contented myself to wander around and see what everyone else had got. We got some tiny baby newts, all frilly around the neck. The adults are much better at hiding and probably very relieved when camp ended and their kids stopped being scooped out of the pond every hour on the hour. We got some dragonfly nymphs and various small bugs, we looked at them through magnifying glasses and compared them to the ID sheets left for us and then we had to brave the big stairs one last time for the closing ceremony.

There are a few awards given out every camp. I know there’s a post somewhere detailing exactly what they are but I can’t find it. One of them is voted for by campers and the others are decided by the mod/patrol leader team. So we presented those three awards, we did a bit of housekeeping (“whose torch is this??”), a few ads for upcoming events, and then we went home. Well, nearly. Charly had brought a caravan to serve as a little Rebel shop (it had a disaster on the motorway getting here) and it needed to be pushed to connect it up to the car – bonus Cup points to anyone who helps. Well, I’m ready to go, we’re twenty minutes earlier than planned, I can push a caravan. But the car was on the other side of the campsite, the caravan needed to be prepared and it took every one of those twenty minutes to get it in position.

Getting home was fun – there was traffic on the M6, a section of the M5 was closed and the diversion my satnav promised me at the services wasn’t the diversion it actually took me on once I got back to the car. Three and a half hours turned into four and three-quarters but it could have been worse and I occupied my mind with pretending I was driving from Reykjavik to Skaftafell, so it didn’t feel as far as it would have done – in fact, by the time I got home, mentally I was only just past Kirkjubæjarklaustur

And that’s Rebel Camp 2025! There’s no camp next year, we’re having a retreat instead and I probably won’t bother with that. But there’s still plenty to come on the blog – three more trips before the end of the year, one of which I just got back from last night, and of course there’s still plenty of Iceland to come, so do come back for my continuing adventures.