Wednesday 28th July

After all the excitement of yesterday, everyone was ready for a quite day, which is exactly what we had. After breakfast and tent inspection (the leaders are so cruel!) the morning was basically leisure time. The sky was clear and people just hung around the campsite, making friends and generally taking it easy.

Once lunch was done, we decided it would be fun to check out the outdoor swimming pool that we'd seen on our day 1 treasure hunt around the village. We got some tickets from reception, handed out pocket money, and all headed off for the 20 minute walk down to the village. As we left clouds were starting to roll in ...

We got to the pool, and it was still dry (pity - we'd get a reduction if it was raining!). The pool proudly boasted that it was heated by solar power to 26 degrees, so the leaders were a bit nervous about getting in. However, the Scouts had no such reservations! We were getting cold standing on the side, so decided it was probably warmer in the water after all! It wasn't that bad actually. Once we'd been in for a few minutes it actually felt pretty warm. There were four interconnected pools - a kiddie one, a leisure pool with a water slide and big inflatable thingy, a general swimming pool, and a diving pool. The leisure pool was the most popular. The guys teamed up with another troop of Scouts who were there and managed to get about 30 people on the slide at once! The life guard didn't seem to mind.

One by one everyone got too cold to carry on - most people lasted about an hour. Once we were all dry, we took the Scouts around the shops so they could get souvenirs. Lots of pen knives were bought!

By now the thickening cloud started to produce rain, and very quickly started to produce lots of rain. We all got very wet on the walk back. But it was short lived, and had gone by the time tea was done. After tea the Scouts all headed off to the village ice rink (which is not an ice rink in the summer - its just an indoor arena) for a huge Scout disco.

I am going to close now, since Katie and Zoe are going to provide their own blog for this page a little later, but right now they are pre-occupied with German Scouts at the disco!

Doug

Update from Zoe and Katie:

Hi it's Zoe here :)

I am writing about the disco up until this moment in time. The disco was great for most people, but not me :( I had a horrid headache:(. Everyone else had a great time dancing and singing along to the songs. Everyone had a great time and Ben decided to try to break dance, not sure if it worked or not but apparently it did, LOL :) All the girls decided to tie their neckerchiefs to their head to make a statement, they looked rather cool :) Katie and Ben argued to see who knew the most songs, Katie won this, much to Ben's disappointment. They met some boys from Sheffield which Ellie thought they were rather cute!!! :D We left the disco around 10:00pm and when we got back (although it was rather cold!) we went straight to sleep as we needed to get up early in the morning for a surprise for Eleanor :)

In the morning we got up early and went straight to the tent, waking everyone up for Eleanor's birthday surprise!! When she came in we all said “SURPRISE” then all sang Happy Birthday with bubbles, party blowers, party poppers and many balloons! :D. After her celebration we went to breakfast then did an activity with another English Scout Troop.

Now, everyone is playing games and finishing their diaries (I am up to date with mine so that is why I am writing this blog!!). Soon we will have lunch and maybe (weather permitting), we will get the cable car up to the mountain hut (with some walking :( ) where we will sleep tonight.

I hope everyone in England is having better weather than us (rain mostly :( ) and I hope to see you all soon. :)