Typical camp schedule and fee.

Our upcoming assembly of TSG Troops or ‘Contio’  will focus on campcraft and is a mere 9 days from today -Nov 30 thru Dec 2.  It will be held at our HQ camp and we will have Troops 5, 31, 33 and 77 and 1170 (from waco) in attendance.  We expect about 80-100 folks total.

Each troop will be responsible for its own food and some of it will be done over open fire by the boys.  There are a few things we do need to coordinate.  Let me know by Sunday, Nov:25 pm if you can help coordinate one or more of the following numbered things:

1)  We need to lead the campfire on Friday and Saturday nites-

2)  We need to lead the morning and evening prayer and flag ceremony on Saturday and Sunday morning prayer.  Note that all troop captains have expressed interest in learning to to this better, so who ever wishes to coordinate this might be ready to have boys from all the troops helping out.

3)  We need to make sure that we are sufficiently prepared for the Mass- Fr. McDonnell will be offering the rite of Penance and the Sacrifice of the Mass.  We do need some help in coordinating servers for this as other troops may wish to assist in this regard- Scott can you do this?

4)  Can someone join me in arriving early friday afternoon ( I intend to arrive by 2:30 at the latest) and assist organizing fire rings for the friday nite campfire,

5)  Can someone be in charge of making sure that the saturday nite campfire is ready too?

As you can see from the schedule, the various troops will be putting on one or two ‘campcraft’ sessions concurrently on saturday morning.  this means that no one will be able to attend all of them, but everyone will be able to attend at least 3 of them.  Each session will run about 45 minutes, and allow 15 minutes of transition between sessions.  We are responsible for the’ Knots you need to Know’ session and the ‘Gear you need and how to Pack it.”  My 16 yo son Max will lead the Gear group, and I can lead the Knots group but both of us can use some assistance. If you know about these things, can you help?  Let me know.

Also, we are going to have a human foosball tournament on Saturday afternoon, and someone good at setting up a tournament needs to run this, otherwise we will have bonafide chaos and not too many will get to play.  The games will necessarily be short.  I will also bring a long, large rope and we can use for the boys to have a tug-of-war with between foosball sessions.  Does anyone have some horseshoes or similar games that they can set up for the boys to play that afternoon?

6)  We will need to have some skits or some activities to do for the Saturday nite campfire that will include the entire group.  Any volunteers?  Is there a Dad or two that can lead a good Story or Spiritual Reflection for part of the campfire?  Likewise, can one of your boys sing a song or do some type entertainment for the event?

7)  While we will do the food shopping as normal, this camp we wish to focus on getting your kids (and you) the chance to build campcrafts skills.  One of those ways is to give all the chance to cook their own food.  So, as normal, friday nite meal is on your own, but saturday breakfast will be something like ‘eggs and bacon in a paper bag’ https://youtu.be/sUhmhVanP_o and for saturday nite, something like what we used to call a ‘bum supper’ now known as a ‘tin foil supper’ https://youtu.be/S0V43G_qYcI.  If you know of a great type of meal, let us know so that we can get the raw materials for such a meal and have them ready to prepare for this campout. For such meals, we will prepare the raw ingredients, but the goal is to have each boy prepare and cook his own. That means that you might see about getting some gloves and a small shovel or tongs for your use in tending the meals while in the fire since so many will be doing this.

8) Fire Tender:  As you can see, we are really going to be relying on open fires a lot this campout and I would like to get one or two of the Dads to make sure that we have great beds of coals in adequate quantities for each meal so that the fire is ready and able to do the job when the meal/campfire time comes.

Finally, this will be the only event we have in December as there are insufficient priests to conduct our Day of Reflection during advent.  However, Fr. McDonnell will be leading us in a Christmas season day of reflection at Mater Dei, but it won’t be until January.