Today Emma started the day by waking up Ben with a saucepan, and telling the rest of the people in the room that they could "just go back to sleep". No one appreciated this except for Ben. We begrudgingly got up and had breakfast, including lots of Aidan's Crunchy Balls, which were very sweet, and nowhere near as delicious as porridge made without milk. After an incredibly long amount of time, we managed to leave to go to the training, which was in the other part of the area that we'd used yesterday.
Ben had planned a number of excellent training courses for us today, making good use of the rocky area. There were two distinct areas on two distinct sides of the road - one was on a hill with lots of rocks, and the other was on a hill with lots of rocks. The rocks to the west were quite big and grey, and the rocks to the east were grey and quite big. One of the controls wasn't in a cave, even though it was supposed to be, and John and Paul stood around for a bit wondering where it was.
At 1241 we had lunch, which consisted of baguettes, cheese and Paul's Big Sausage. Emma sat and programmed some geocaches into her gps, and Oxford decided to go home because they didn't want any more training.
After that, we headed off to the other side of the forest for some training planned by a local club. Paul navigated expertly, with a mistake coming onto the dual carriageway, which he planned for in advance and worked out an alternate route, and another mistake where he told Ben to take the second exit at a roundabout, only to remember that the French use roundabouts anticlockwise, so we needed the second last exit instead.
The next training area was quite different, in very dry oak forest with quite a lot of bracken in places, and far fewer rocks. Everyone had lots of fun, especially when we got to punch a control on a huge aqueduct.
We left and went back to the hostel, where Oxford were already busy cooking bangers and mash, meaning that dinner was really really early today (we were done by 1730!). CUOC recommends a dinner time in the official dinner window of 18:30-22:00. Maybe they'll do better tomorrow.
Sitemap