timeimmortal

This will be the first in a series of entries in which I transcribe my diary from the 21st World Scouts Jamboree into something a little more readable and a little more descriptive…and, of course, a lot less “pen and paper”. Keep checking back, O Reader, as there will be more such updates to come!

Departure

Grace took me to the airport, and the rest of the Crew began to arrive shortly thereafter. I spent most of the day with Grace, in fact, which was a nice sendoff if I do say so myself. Much to be preferred to spending the whole day kicking around in the basement waiting for a ride to the airport.

We departed Edmonton at about 8:00 PM (the official scheduled time for the flight was 7:55 PM, and Air Canada managed to almost adhere to that. Getting through security prior to this was mostly a breeze, despite the fact that we were all decked out in our Scouting uniforms. My belt set off the alarm, as I had forgotten to remove it for the security scanner. The wand scanner also picked up the plates in my left arm, something I’ve never seen happen before.

And I just have to say it at the outset, so that it’s clear: these “official” red Scouting belts that we’ve got as part of the uniform? They suck. They are terrible, and useless, and…well…red. Ew.

The Flight

The flight was okay, for the most part. The plane was, I suspect, a bit older, and it certainly had a healthy supply of rattles and shakes to share with its passengers, but I’m such a kid when I fly that I didn’t really mind. Even when we were landing, and the plane was experiencing these sudden, stomach-wrenching dips, I was enjoying the view out the window and the sensation of being aloft. I’m such a kid when I fly.

The view was intermittent, but when there weren’t clouds there were some spectacular sights to be seen out the airplane’s small windows. In particular, there was a great view of Greenland to be had, with its rocky peaks sticking out of its vast glaciers. Iceland, on the other hand, was obscured by clouds.

As alluded to above, the landing was ‘questionable’ — a few dips plagued the approach, and while I didn’t mind these, they certainly left a number of people around me gripping onto the seats for dear life. The actual ‘touchdown’ was rather bumpy, but not jarringly so.

Heathrow

None of our luggage was inadvertently lost by Air Canada, which was a small blessing in and of itself (I have been regaled with horror stories of late). Getting through customs was a pretty quick and painless process, which surprised me and left me more than a little grateful.

Technically, I committed a customs violation — just before we headed off to the airport, Grace bought me some snow peas and blackberries at the local Save-On, and as I spent a goodly portion of the flight trying to sleep I only really opened these up when we landed in Britain.

At which point I remembered the sign that expressly forbade the bringing of, among other things, fruits and vegetables into the country. Oh, well…I figured that as long as I didn’t actually leave the airport with them, there wouldn’t be any lasting harm done. And, as it turns out, my undeclared, illegal fruits and vegetables served as an effective ice-breaker.

The buses that were theoretically supposed to take us to North Weald, the airfield that had been converted to the staging area for Jamboree registrations, had been delayed by several hours due to an accident on the M25 highway. The four hour wait, though, was not wasted. In addition to meeting a few other Canadian groups who had been on the same flight, I wandered into a drug store and found a few bottles of some deodorant that a friend of mine had asked me to bring back (it’s one of the only deodorant brands in the world that she’s not allergic to, apparently). What the lady behind the counter thought of a man in a Scouting uniform buying six canisters of ladies hygiene products, I shall (thankfully) never know.

To North Weald

When the buses finally did manage to get through, the first thing that struck me as being truly “different” (in the “I’m in another country” sense of the word) was the narrowness of the roads. And I mean staggeringly narrow — in more than one case, branches of roadside trees were merrily slapping against the windows of the bus as we sped toward our destination. And that was the second thing that struck me — everyone on those roads drives with a sense of abandon, and even the buses were darting along at 40 or 50 miles per hour — this on a narrow, two-lane road, mind you.

Registration at North Weald took a couple of hours — we’d been in England for only a few hours, and we’d already been able to experience the magic of queues. Overall, though, it was a straightforward thing; you show the nice people your passport, they hand you a nametag and a little bag full of information about the Jamboree and the nearby city of Chelmsford, as well as a few other things, and send you back out to wait for a bus to take you to the Jamboree site proper — Hylands Park.

Hylands Park

Arriving at the Jamboree site, we had to hike our packs in across the site — which was in the middle of being set up. That made for about a thirty minute walk, which certainly got us off on the right foot in terms of “exercise by walking”. The adult sub-camp is buried at the back of the site, and is about the furthest point from the arrival terminal. Whether that’s by design or not, I’m not going to speculate. Regardless, it was nice to see, upon our arrival at said sub-camp, that the Canadians who had arrived in the days before us had gotten bored…and so had decided to pitch all the tents that had been shipped over for our use. We were shown to our (completely and properly set up) tents, unburdened ourselves of our backpacks, and set off again to walk around the site for a bit before dinner.

The park itself was quite a nice area, and I could tell that there’d be a lot of photo opportunities that would present themselves in the coming weeks.

There was a bit of an ulterior motive for our walking around, however — clothing. A number of us, myself included, had ordered incorrect sizes of shirts from Scouts Canada, and we were informed in the days prior to our departure that we could get correctly-fitting clothing at “Canada House”, a marquee tent situated somewhere in the middle of the Jamboree site. We found it with relative ease, and the clothing exchange went off without hassle — I got my new dry-fit shirts and vest, and resolved to at least try on one of the shirts the following morning.

An aside: it has to be noted that our red berets seemed to garner us a lot of attention. We had thought, coming to England, that more nations would have maintained the beret as a part of the Scouting uniform. It turns out that the opposite is true, and so our distinctive red hats (which, incidentally, are not a part of the official Scouts Canada uniform) were an object of interest for many people that we met.
Offers to trade were not entertained.

After a bit more wandering around, we returned to the adult sub-camp for our first trip through the dining hall that had been set up on site. It was a massive enterprise — a staggeringly long marquee, partitioned into two sections, with row after row after row of tables set up. Each section had nine or ten hot buffets set up, and the seating capacity for the entire structure easily numbered in the thousands. Jamie guessed that the floor area of the two sections was greater than that of the U of A’s Butterdome.

After dinner, we walked to another part of the adult sub-camp to explore a facet of the Jamboree that was “new” to all of us — the presence of a fully-equipped bar. Beer at a Scout camp seemed such a foreign idea, but it was a welcome thing at the end of a long day. Tokens — which could be redeemed for beer — could be purchased in a nearby “Services” tent, along with a pint glass. Armed with these two things, one could procure pints of very good beer indeed.

We were all surprisingly energetic as the day drew to a close, despite having not really slept for the past 36 hours. The beer seemed to mellow us out a little bit, and most of us turned in rather early. Before doing so, I scouted out the location of the phones — I wanted to know where to go to call home. Or, rather, to call Grace.

~ by Kenneth on September 4, 2007.