We had our first camping trip with our new camping chair a couple of weeks ago.  It all turned out great in the end–just thought I'd share a couple of things we ended up re-learning:

First, the phone call 2 weeks before the campout–the site we'd reserved was restricting us to 8 vehicles. This was a new regluation since we camped there a couple of years ago. They did have another site available though, which would allow the 15-20 vehicles we were expecting–for another $30/night. Oh and that site doesn't have its own vault toilets–you'd have to walk down to the next site to use theirs. Doh!  Fortunately, we could cover the cost and the new site was actually nicer.

Second, one of our asst. cubmasters who usually brings up everything in the storage unit related to camping? Couldn't make it. And, no one else thought to go pick up all of those items–our new camp chair figured the person in charge of the food was also in charge of the cooking equipment. She didn't realize he was thinking she'd pick all that stuff up as well as the food. The storage unit has our unit flags, camp stoves, canopy, camp tools and the flag we were planning on doing a retirement ceremony for. Doh! Fortunately a couple of us (myself and one other mom) had brought our own propane stoves and kitchen boxes–but cooking for 60 on 4 burners and limited propane made for some interesting meal trade-offs!  The site fortunately also had some nice grills so we were able to do some cooking that way, but we still pretty much ran the fuel out by Sunday morning.

Third, it was really cold. We had a couple families not come, we didn't know if it was because of the temps or because of illnesses, but they didn't tell us they weren't coming until the day before. We ended up with way too much food–which is usually better than not enough, but it can turn into a budgeting problem. We had a campfire going all day Saturday–which meant we needed more wood. Fortunately it was the last weekend the campground was open so we got permission from the camp host to raid other campsites for split wood.

Fourth, one of the families who couldn't make it was one of our leaders, in charge of geocaching, map and compass, and whittling chip. They hadn't given us the map of where they wanted to do the hike for map and compass so we had no idea where they'd planned to go. I did have the geocaches loaded in my own GPS so we just did the geocaching portion (once we figured out a trail to get there) not the M&C. For whittling chip we went up the mountain where there were phones and called up one of the people coming up Sat. morning so they could pick up some Ivory soap and plastic knives.

So, the campout didn't look much like we originally planned it, but we ended having a good time anyway! Looking at it, though, our 'backup' methods depended heavily on just a couple of families who just happened to have brought things along (myself included).  I just wonder what would have happened if we didn't have a lot of experienced campers in the group–it could've been a pretty miserable weekend!