Raven Scouts

It's been quite some time since we last posted but life has been a bit crazy - a new job, dealing with a new cat, getting into birding and possibly most importantly, learning to kayak.  The general consensus with kayaking is that you can jump right in and start paddling.  By and large, this is true.  But what if you want to up the ante a bit? We'll get to that shortly. Bobcat got a head-start when it comes to the Raven Scout kayaking adventures.  Not only did she go out on the water ahead of the rest of us, she ended up purchasing a kayak!  For Wolf and I, we started out with some rentals at a local reservoir with Bobcat showing us the ropes.  Our first day out, we learned some basic paddling techniques and got a major upper-body workout.  We also stumbled upon this amazing tree! After a few times out, Wolf and I decided it was time to get our own kayaks and we went with a sit-on-top model (no whitewater rapids in our future).  The mode...

Part I - the Camping Trip:      Early Saturday morning we started driving to South Mountain State Park for a camping trip.  We took two cars with Bobcat and I in one.  On the way there, we talked about a lot of things... I told her about my new job, we talked about how we'd survive if society collapsed.  At one point I mentioned our failed attempts to get a puppy recently.  Bobcat commented that it was probably a good thing since it opened us up for something serendipitous to happen.  This way a pet could just walk into our life when the time was right.  She really said that... also, this is called foreshadowing. We hiked into South Mountain State Park on a Saturday around noon.  Wolf, Bobcat, myself, Badger, Dragon and a new Raven Scout... he hasn't picked a name yet so I'll call him Hawk until he decides. This was Badger's first camping trip and the weather was perfect. The time passed pretty quickly as we hiked up the mountain...

We got home and I immediately began to map out our options with Wolf and Bobcat.  All the merit badge requirements can be found here: http://www.scouting.org/ with handy-dandy pdfs breaking down what to do.  This, combined with the Boy Scout handbook and Internet search engines were all the resources we needed to get started.  We wanted to start out by looking into the Eagle Scout requirements... from a Merit Badge stand point, Eagle Scouts have to earn the following 13 badges: Camping Cooking One of: Swimming, Hiking or Cycling (though we planned to earn them all) Citizenship in the Community Citizenship in the Nation Citizenship in the World Communication One of: Lifesaving or Emergency Preparedness One of: Environmental Science or Sustainability Family Life First Aid Personal Fitness Personal Management In addition, an Eagle Scout would need to earn 8 elective merit badges.  The merit badges that peaked our interest either individually or a...

Bobcat, Wolf and Mouse were the names we gave each other on our first camping trip... We hiked around 6 miles to our site with packs that were far far too full... we had enough food for a five day trip, even though we would only be there for one night.  In our eagerness, we also chose a trail that was categorized as "strenuous" and which ended up being a significant amount of uphill for three out-of-practice campers.  Along the way, we adjusted who was carrying what, changed from pants to shorts, and generally figured things out as we went.  For all of us, it had been years since our last trip into the woods... but this trip sparked a pretty amazing journey for the three of us. It all really started because we decided to engage in a survival exercise.  Imagining that we were in some sort of post-apocalyptic end world scenario (one where we could survive in the woods, albeit with risk - e.g. not a nuclear fallout situation), we started talking about the sk...