"I am at two with nature"

Well, I'm glad to say that I survived the Girl Scout camping trip and the biggest surprise of all is that I even enjoyed it!
The girls in my troop are alot of fun and they were all super excited about the trip. Even though it rained all weekend they didn't complain--other than a couple of girls asking if they could go clean off their muddy Crocs every 10 minutes--but just enjoyed their time together. All the girls but one was able to go and as you can see from the pictures they are great friends and don't suffer from shyness at all!
The camp was pretty cool. It's located on Yang Ming Mountain in the middle of a rain forest. I guess I didn't realize until this trip that Taiwan has rain forests, but apparently it does, and this one certainly lived up to it's name.


We were divided up into tents with names like "Frog Pond" and "Mantis Mansion". The tents were the heavy duty kind that made you feel like you were in one of those movies where all the British colonialists are out on safari in Africa. They were pretty cool. If I had a back yard I might need to get one to have parties in. And we didn't have to sleep on the ground because each tent had beds. I realize that for some of you that disqualifies this trip as a "real" camping experience but I'm ok with that. Especially when you consider all the creepy things that are crawling around the ground in Taiwan. Did you know that Taiwan has COBRAS?? And apparently they've just all hatched out new babies. Yeah... not to mention the centipedes, roaches, banana spiders and numerous other things of which I prefer to remain ignorant.
On Saturday the girls rode a zipline, did a (very muddy) nature scavenger hunt, and climbed on the rock climbing wall. I was preparing myself to do the zipline and rock climbing if necessary but I must admit I breathed a sigh of relief when they told us the activities were for the kids only. It's good for the girls to maintain the illusion that their leader is cool as long as possible, and that would have been shattered by the screams that would have inevitably come from my mouth at being forced to jump off a high platform and fly across the sky on a wire.
Here are some pictures of the girls with their safety equipment. The last picture is them testing the safety helmets by banging their heads together. Those girl scouts are so smart!
The hardest thing about the camping trip was going to bed so early. The girls were supposed to have their lights out by 9:30 and the leaders had theirs out by 10:00. That's so crazy to me. I managed to go to sleep for a while but then about an hour later I woke up and apparently my body thought I had just taken a nap because it was awake and ready to go! At about 12:30 a cabin of girls was awake and partying with their light on so they had to be quieted down. Then at 5:00 a.m. (that mythical hour that most of us night owls only see if we are still awake from the night before) the same cabin of girls was awake and partying again! I spent most of the 4 1/2 hours between the two parties listening to the rain, wondering what baby cobras looked like, and wishing I'd broken the rules and brought my ipod.
All in all it was a good experience. It's good to get out of the city once in a while, if only so you can appreciate it more when you come back. The funny thing is that after listening to the rain and the sounds of wildlife for 24 hours the city seemed so quiet when I got back. I remember once my sister in law's parents (who are from the big city of Des Moines, IA) complaining about not being able to sleep in the country because it was too loud. At the time I thought they were crazy but now I totally get it. I guess I'm officially "city folk" now!:-)
But I now know that I can survive in "nature", even if it's only for one weekend a year. Bring on next year's trip!