Defending the Camp
Greybeard reads further in his old trekking diary and stumbles across a funny story which happened during one of his hiking trips.
After the sun had slightly changed the position I left the nice place in the grass and continued to walk ahead to the campsite I had spotted on my map. To my surprise it was not a commercial site but a youth campsite, occupied by a kids group from Aschaffenburg. When I asked for a small spot for my tent they allocated me an area and invited me for the evening to dinner and entertainment at the fireplace, of course I immediately accepted. During meal I was asked to introduce myself and the whole crowd was asked if they allowed me to stay: the (obvious) answer was „Jaaaa!“. They were 55 kids and 16 supervisors belonging to KJG (Katholic Youth Organization where I was member, too). For some time I was the star, they wanted to know „where from?“, „where to?“, „why?“ and „how long?“. One of boys asked me, when I had started to walk alone as he thought he had already seen me some while ago.
For entertainment some small groups had some presentations in connection to different countries, so they showed sketches and dances. After that we sat around the fire and I simply stayed there as it was so cosy and nice with these strangers. I have to mention the site had been excellently prepared, during the afternoon I had noticed a „giant swing“ (an almost 7 m rope hanging from a branch) and a „warm shower“ (a sun heated water tube on the roof of a wooden cabin).
At 2 in the night When i still had a debate with one of the group’s heads about one of my favorite topics (related to what happened to me during lunch in the restaurants in the woods), they immediately came: the invaders! I recognized very quickly it was a group of adolescents from the same village as the kid’s group and the invasion was just for fun, but I helped my hosts as good as I could to defend the camp and strike the „aggressors“ back. However I didn‘t hardly know anyone of the groups, neither from one side nor from the other. It was easy for the invaders to pretend belonging to the defenders group as in the dark I could hardly recognize any face, so it happened I was misled by them in the wrong direction. Finally I was able to catch one of the invaders when he was about to collapse one of the kid’s tents. The kids were of course frightened but it was also a big event and an adventure for them. I remembered when I was part of a similar camp 10 years ago the same happened to us, so these attacks are a good tradition during kid’s summer camps.
That night I ran around the campsite until probably 4:30 in the morning. It was a capital joke for all of us and we ended all of us sitting jointly around the fire and laughing about the fun and jolly situations we have had during the invasion. This night I felt as if I was part of this group since very long, though I had only arrived in the afternoon some 12 hours before.
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