100 Days of Scouting: Day 33, Totin' Chip Training

Day 33, Saturday March 12th

Woke up around 6:30 am this morning. It sure was nice to sleep in a cabin on this campout. Waking up in a room that's around 65 degrees sure is nice when you've been sleeping in below freezing temperatures for the last few months.

Got the Scouts up and got them going by around 6:45 to 7:00 am.

We all headed over to the dining hall to start cooking our breakfast. We had 3 separate Patrols on this campout. With the adult patrol cooking, that made 4 separate cooking areas. The oldest Patrol is the Cobra Patrol. Next is the Lightning Patrol, and last is the new Scout Patrol. They decided to call themselves the Dragon Patrol. I was really impressed with how well the Dragon Patrol did on their cooking. We just put a new Grubmaster program in place this month and this was the first campout that we practiced it. Our new program is different than the way we did it in the past. In the past we had a different cook for every meal. The Grubmaster bought the food that everyone in the Patrol had planned. Our new Grubmaster program takes all the planning and cooking and puts it in the hands of the one single Grubmaster. The Grubmaster plans the menu, buys the food, and then cooks every meal the entire weekend. The advantage to this program is the ease of tracking the 1st class requirements of cooking the meals.I thought there might be some complaining about not having any say in the meal planning by the other members of the Patrol, but to my surprise I didn't hear one complaint.

After breakfast had been cleaned up I took the Dragon Patrol out to do some Totin' Chip training. Normally I would have had the older Scouts do this training for the new Scouts, but they had some Pre-req's for the Geocaching Merit Badge they needed to get done before the upcoming Merit Badge class. So, while the Cobra Patrol and the Lightning Patrol were off hiding a few geocaches I started the Totin' Chip training. It went pretty smooth. The new Scouts really enjoyed learning all about knife, ax, and bow-saw use. After the class was over I gave them some time to practice their whittling skills. They all really enjoyed making some sharp pointed sticks to run with.

After lunch the Scouts went looking for the geocaches they had put out. The Cobra Patrol looked for the ones that the Lightning Patrol had set, and the Lightning Patrol looked for the ones that the Cobra Patrol had set. We split the Dragon Patrol between the other 2 Patrols and they got to do a little Geocaching too.

After hiking all over the woods in the afternoon it was time for dinner. It went really well, with all the Scouts getting their fill of the good food the Grubmasters prepared. The adults got their fill too.

After dinner we watched a movie. It was "Race to Witch Mountain", which all the Scouts really enjoyed.

Then it was Cracker Barrel and bedtime. After such a full day we were all pretty tired, so it didn't take long until everyone was snoozing soundly.

That's all for Day 33. Keep reading for more!