#bronzedofe

[ineffablehunter]

finishing bronze dofe after 2 years and 2 months

[rebeccaravenclaw]

Finished my Bronze DofE Expedition

Our practise expedition had been pretty terrible, so it’s fair to say we didn’t have the highest of hopes… Let's also bear in mind the fact 2 of us (including myself) had been on a residential geography course the day before our walking. We were told on the night before (our teacher wanted us to stay for 2 nights bc why not…) that even though a girl in our group has scoliosis, they wouldn’t take any of her equipment, so we (unexpectedly) had to share it out amongst the group. Next, we had to re-route some of our 1st day (and therefore had to rewrite all of our route cards), and most of our 2nd day too. Then once we’d actually started, we were an hour late to our 2nd checkpoint after doing an hour long circle and ending up exactly where we’d started. Then between checkpoint 3 and 4 we once again did an hour long circle. We ended up on a construction site/industrial site which was quite muddy, where we couldn’t find a way out of. Turns out it wasn’t even on our map… at that point we found our assessor who found a way out, and so we basically walked with him for an hour (over a slippy fence, through a horse field, over a see-saw stile and through a chicken farm) until we got to our campsite. Just remember it was chucking down with rain half the time too. All my stuff was damp, and I didn’t fall asleep until about 1am because I was shivering so much in my damp sleeping bag. Day 2, we actually left the campsite at 7:30, way before any of the other groups there. Having said that, we then did another hour long circle so in total went through the chicken farm (herding chickens at points) 3 times…! We got to checkpoint 1 about 30 minutes late I think. Going from checkpoint 1 to 2 was fairly straightforward as it was mainly on roads. We met up with our assessor (+ teacher leader who was incredibly kind and helpful throughout both our practise and real expedition), and had a 10 minute walk where we ended up with another group (that’s the other half of our large friendship group) under a large oak tree and besides a lake. That was definitely the high point of the expedition (apart from the end obvs). We then let them go ahead, and 40 minutes later found them again at our 3rd and final check point bang on time. Our assessor and teacher were both genuinely surprised to see us on time! It was then another 40ish minutes to our finish, and we sang songs to keep us going. We were on track to arrive at 1:15, but weren’t allowed back (DofE rules don’t ask) until 1:30, so sat down in a field (which we had gone through on the first day) and had another picnic where we discussed the whole expedition. We ended up being the 2nd group back out of 19, and we were so happy. We had an incredible amount of lows, and thought we were going to get disqualified, be sick (one person was) or give up. But, we persevered through, and ended up coming 2nd out of 19, and our assessor passed us. I wasn’t much help on the trip, but I’m incredibly proud of our group and our determination :)