Orienteering

The night after we got back from Clervaux the scoutmasters woke us up at 2 AM and stuck us in the back of a covered farm truck. We were split into 6 or 7 man teams and driven out to the middle of nowhere. Each team was dropped off at a different place with a flashlight, compass and handwritten instructions to get back to camp.

Keep in mind that we had spent the past 2 days hiking around Luxembourg and had hardly gotten any sleep so we were dead tired (physically and mentally) - and a lot of the instructions were "landmark" based... Now - I'd been out on some dark nights before but nothing like this one. There was no moon and it was overcast so we couldn't see the stars. There wasn't a light in sight - we couldn't even see the ground we were walking on let alone any landmarks :-)

At one point we arrived at a tee intersection in the trail and it seemed like we should turn left but our "landmark" was an abandoned mill and we couldn't find it. A few of the scouts spent the next 10 minutes arguing about whether we should turn left - or backtrack looking for the mill - or keep going ahead looking for the mill... I didn't care - I just wanted to get back to camp :-)
Finally one of the scouts took the flashlight and panned it very slowly around the intersection - and discovered that we were standing right next to the mill. Granted, there was a lot of overgrowth, but we were so close we could almost touch it - that's how freaking dark it was...

The next couple of hours were a comedy of errors. We kept missing landmarks and ended up hopelessly disoriented. (That's sort of a pun given the topic of the post). Finally as dawn approached we could begin to make out our surroundings and one of the scouts spotted a familiar hillside off in the distance. So we tossed the instructions and headed cross country - through barbed wire fences and across the pastures, pitching dried cow-patties at each other along the way :-) We got back to camp around sunrise and (at last) got a bit of well deserved rest...

I wouldn't exactly call it an enjoyable experience - being woken up in the middle of the night and tossed in the back of a truck rarely is - but it was a memorable one nonetheless...

One more quick story:
A few nights earlier around dawn I was awakened by a wasp stinging me on the cheek (I probably rolled over onto it). I opened my eyes just in time to watch it crawl down inside my sleeping bag... Now - it doesn't seem like it should be possible to get out of a zipped sleeping bag in a single move without using your hands but I'm pretty sure I managed to do that...
I was afraid to try and find the wasp because I thought it might take off and sting me in the face again (that really hurt!) so I just sat there cold and tired waiting for the stupid thing to crawl back out of my bag so I could kick its butt... After about an hour the patrol leader woke up and asked me why I was staring at my sleeping bag. I explained about the wasp and he was nice enough to locate it and "off" it for me so I could finally get a bit more sleep...

I think the main reason I've never forgotten the experience is the hour I spent sitting there consciously weighing my desire to avoid pain against my desire for warmth and sleep. As usual, "pain avoidance" won :-)