As promised...

...I am going to blog about the school trip I got back from three days ago.

So, on Monday morning, I chose to sleep in until 7:28. It was awesome. I got up, threw the stuff I was going to take into my backpack, and then loaded my stuff, my mom's stuff, and my sister's stuff into the van (our van was the larger of the two vehicles that we took, and it had 7/9 seats taken). So I also ended up being one of the three people who loaded basically everything into the van and then arranged it in a way that would be most comfortable for those of us who would be sitting in it.

One of the mom's (one of the ones who wasn't going on the trip) came by and dropped off cookies, lollipops, and sour candy (the last being totally awesome, btw). Which I promptly stashed in my backpack (I doled it out later, but in small increments :D).

Anyway, we had a mostly uneventful trip there (some four or five hours long), throughout which I had next-to-no leg room, and we listened to one of my friends' iPod through a portable speaker. Then, shortly before we got there, it started snowing. It was miserable, especially because my shoes don't fit me anymore (I just got new ones today), so I hadn't taken them with me, just sandals. And it was snowing. I thought at first that I was totally done for, if it was going to be snowing the whole time, but it all melted the second day.

We had a really big treasure hunt that we had to set up for the second day, with the guys vs the girls, so it was four versus six (though we found out later that the moms were actually helping them out, so it was actually four versus ten). Anyway, each team had to draw a map of the ranch where we were staying, as detailed and proportional as we could, and then hide two clues and a final prize. Each team gave the other a clue to lead them to one of the other two, which led the next, etc.

Anyway, that's how it ended up that at 11 o'clock on Tuesday night I was past my knees in a really cold stream hiding a banana under a bridge. The air temperature was somewhere a little below freezing, because the non-flowing water was ice. I disguised it as walking the dog. It was actually a little freaky, because the sky was clouded over, so there was no starlight/moonlight, and since this was a ranch, the only light came from the buildings on the ranch, and they didn't reach that far. So whenever my friend flicked the flashlight beam away from the path in front of us (which he did on a regular basis when he was looking behind us or something), we were literally plunged into absolute darkness. We were halfway to the bridge when I told him that those who had gone horse riding that day had seen fresh (as in, from that day) bear tracks. We went a little faster after that. Still, it was totally awesome. I waded out into the middle of the stream, while he held the flashlight so I could see what I was doing. I hid the banana a little less than a meter towards the middle of the bridge, on a part of the metal frame that had been bent down. Then we went back.

Right after I changed out of my now-soaking jeans, we decided that we might as well hide one of the other clues that night, too, while the girls weren't watching. So my friend and I once again went outside and hid our second clue under a rusted metal wagon-bed in front of the stables.

In the morning, we hid the last clue, made it back before the girls were up, and then we all ate breakfast. At 7:15, we scattered to go find the clues and stuff. The girls first one was really easy to find, but it took ten minutes to walk to it, and it was also around 20 meters out of bounds. The second one, according to the instructions, required us to walk 496 hockey-stick-lengths WE. Which is "West-East." Naturally, we got totally confused over that, until it was decided that they probably meant NNE (North, North-east) and had just run the Ns together so that they looked like a W. Anyway, we followed those instructions, but then we were supposed to take "the path to the left. Not to the right, not to the middle, or anything else. To the left." Well, we were walking on the side of the road (and the road was one of the boundaries). We were walking on the right side of the road. Going to the left would take us out of bounds, and the only place on that side that we could walk on was the railroad tracks, which would be infinitely not-cool. So we decided to go with our instinct and the assumption that, despite their insistance otherwise, the girls had gotten their directions mixed up. Well, we were right. After ten minutes of walking, we found the pole that the directions, once corrected, led us to. Unfortunately, there was no clue there. So we split up and found it on a small signpost (like a trail marker) around 40 meters away. As it turns out, my sister (who happened to be the one hiding it) hadn't felt like walking all the way out to the pole, since it was in the middle of around six centimeters of icy water, and had instead put it on the signpost, neglecting to correct the instructions afterward.

Regardless, we found it. When we looked back over the ranch from where we were, though (we were on higher elevation than the rest of the ranch at the time), we saw the girls had definitely not figured out our clue. The first one that we gave them required them to go to one of two storm drains within the boundaries, and then walk such-and-such paces in such-and-such a direction. We didn't want to give them a hard time finding the first clue, though, so we put it in plain sight. Well, sure enough, they all went to the wrong storm drain first. We sent them to the other one, and they spotted the clue from around 100 meters away. w00t for them. That clue, though, was the one that would eventually lead to the wagon. It was a poem, which gave such hints as the location being red, being a bed that you couldn't sleep on, being near "where the horses are at bay", etc. Somehow, through some presumably twisted reasoning, the girls walked like twenty minutes across the pasture to the train tracks, as if they at all fit the clue (I still don't understand their reasoning, and btw, the wagonbed happened to be around ten meters from the main building).

We called them back and let them know that they didn't need to go out that far, and then tried to figure out their last clue. It was a poem.

Mirror, mirror, on the dresser
Tell us, are we any lesser?
Are we fatter than before?
Have we lost weight,
Or gained more?

Well, we figured that the first bit was just to throw us off. After all, there was no dresser in the main room. We checked behind the mirrors, though, just to make sure. In the main suite, where we guys slept, there was nothing behind the mirrors. It's just an understood thing on these sorts of events that the rooms are not co-ed, so we figured that the girls rooms were off limits unless we were told otherwise, which we weren't. So, we abandoned that line of thought and tried to think of what else the poem could mean.

We came up with the idea that they meant the stream--after all, it's narrower in some places and wider in others, and it is reflective, like a mirror. Furthermore, while the stream was drawn on their map with approximately the same width throughout the whole thing, at one point it suddenly dropped to a third (max) of its width, and there were erase marks around that whole section, which led us to think that it was intentional. So we walked out that way.

It turned out that they had just free-handed the stream, hadn't really looked to see how it ran (unlike us guys--one of us fell in while we were checking it out :D), and thus, that narrow spot was pure accident. Well, we spent some fifteen minutes trying to find this supposed bottleneck, with no luck. I rolled my jeans up and walked through the stream a few times in narrower areas looking for whatever they had hid, on the chance that we had found the 'right' bottleneck. Needless to say, those were fruitless minutes.

We went back to the buildings some five minutes after the time was up, and found out that somehow the girls hadn't found the banana. We had seen them finally find the clue under the wagonbed, and that clue was our most brilliant--it was something that they had to use the Quadratic Formula to solve, etc., but we specified that they couldn't use a calculator. They had to solve for C, which was the number (counting from the East side) of the bridge plank that the banana was hidden under. They thought that the equation was just meant to throw them off, and went and looked under the bridge. Fortunately for us, they didn't look far enough under it (they basically just stuck their heads over the edge, which gives them far too shallow of an angle to see it) and they didn't get it.

In the end, we found out that they had gotten permission with the moms to hide their thing in one of their rooms, and had just neglected to tell us that the rooms weren't restricted anymore. w00t for them. I ended up going back into the stream to get the banana back out, and once again had to change into shorts while my jeans dried. w00t for me.

Anyway, it was an awesome time.

The evening before, we had climbed a nearby hill, which was only 600 some meters tall, but it was just really steep, so it was literally a climb, with us using our hands as much as our feet to reach the top (along the trail). That was really, really fun, except that I was in sandals for lack of shoes that fit, and that the sun hadn't really melted the snow on the climbable side of the hill (one side was climbable, the other was quite literally a sheer drop). So my toes were cold for a while.

Since only four of us were really 'athletic' or whatever, and one of those four happened to be the one designated to carry the backpack with everyone's cameras; my sister, my friend (the same one who hid the clues with me later that night--Chad), and I ended up being the ones to lift people past the difficult places and lower them down and stuff. It was really fun, but several times, in bracing myself so that I could literally pull people up icy patches, I sat in snow. The snow was gone by the time I stood up, but I was starting to get really cold. :P

Anyway, it only took us twenty-five minutes to reach the top, and the view was awesome, since it was like smack-dab in the middle of the valley, so there wasn't anything taller to block the view of the entire ranch property as well as the surrounding villages. The way down, though, took around forty-five minutes. My sister and Chad went at the front, and I was the rear guard. However, it seemed as though everyone in between those two and I slid down all of the steeper parts on their butts, which meant that all of my handholds had just been smoothed away, which made bracing myself and lowering people a lot more challenging. We were all really dirty and scraped up by the time we reached the bottom, but it was really fun.

So, the climb was Tuesday evening, and the treasure hunt was Wednesday morning. We left Wednesday afternoon, around two o'clock. This time, we literally had no leg room. I could not touch the floor. I spent most of the four or five hour trip with my knees tucked under my chin (my legs cramped up early on, which made it really painful for a little while), which was only slightly worse than how everyone else was stuck sitting, since they had only like two different ways to sit. So we were all really glad to get out at the end.

It was, overall, a fun trip, especially the climb and the treasure hunt, but I'm glad to be back--for starters, now I have the computer again.