Ducks, Trains and 409

Once upon a time, (last Friday) I went on a ward camp out.


I had had a little bit of a rough Friday and wasn't exactly in the mood to go play R.S. pres all evening. Tawny, Cindy (my VT coordinator) and myself made plans to all go up together. So Cindy met us at the house, we loaded up the car and left for the night. I immediately knew what kind of pick me up I needed. Disney songs! So I plugged I my ipod and sang all the way up. 3 songs into the drive, I was feeling much better. We got up there, set up our tent (very humorously, might I add...we had an incident with the rain fly. Lets just say we basically slept under the stars that night, even though we were in a tent haha), grabbed some food and then sat around the campfire, talking and laughing and enjoying time with others in the ward.

WELL...

Early on in the evening, Lane, our elders quorum president, figured out he could lure the ducks wherever he wanted to by throwing little handfuls of chips out to them. They would follow him anywhere. (See exhibit A below)

(Exhibit A)



I caught on early enough that he was trying to get them into our tent. Every once and a while I would see him getting the ducks closer and closer to our tent, at which point I would abruptly march over there and chase the ducks back into the pond. It was entertaining and fun, but I began to get paranoid that the ducks WERE going to somehow end up in the tent. So every so often i would go check. Lane started teasing me "you might want to go check on your tent Kelsee". But he was always teasing because he knew I was paranoid. There was never anything inside the tent when I would check.

Well, later on that night, Lane was sitting by me around the camp fire and by this time he seemed to have given up on the duck business. Well I happened to glance over my shoulder and saw someone standing by our tent...

I paused and said "hmm do I need to be concerned with the white shirt sneaking away from our tent?" to which lane simply shrugged his shoulders. A few minutes later I said to tawny and cindy, "Maybe one of us should go check on the tent" and immediately lane piped in and said "I think that would be a really good idea" I laughed it off because I thought he was just playing off my paranoia. But then he said "no really. I think you might want to go check on it." and I kind of had a concerned look on his face. So Cindy, getting annoyed with the playful banter, gets up grabs the flash light and walks over towards the tent. Moments later we hear a scream followed by loud laughter. I looked at lane with a "no way" look in my eye and jumped up to go investigate.

Sure enough, as we shined the light into the tent, two nervous, flapping, quacking ducks were zipped up into our tent.

NO WAY!! How??

Well, apparently after his lack of success, Lane jokingly challenged this guy Mike to get the ducks in the tent for him. Mike is a very odd duck (no pun intended) himself. Just one of those people who are strange in a way that makes you slightly uncomfortable. And we learned that night not to put anything past him. You tell him to try and do something like catch two crazy ducks and put them in the girls tent, he'll get it done! haha

Well you can only imagine what happened next...

Think if you were a small feathered animal that could only quack and flap and you got locked in a vinyl prison...what would you do? Oh yes that's right

POOP ALL OVER EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!

Way to think that one through President. Haha! It was a super gross mess. When Mike and Lane realized what those gross little creatures had done, they felt really bad. The task of getting the ducks out of the tent proved quite humorous as well. They didn't want to cooperate. Finally, upon getting them out and realizing the mess, the boys started to clean. It smelled disgusting! And I kid you not, it was EVERYWHERE!! Huge mess. Lane was like, "Holy crap! How could two little ducks do all this in 15 minutes??" haha haha He ended up driving to a walmart and getting a bottle of 409 (and bringing us redemption ice cream ha) and scrubbing down the whole tent. It was the best part of the whole camp out. Everybody was laughing and joking about even on Sunday when we came to church.

We do good news minute in R.S. and Tasha, our FHE committee head, raised her hand and said "my good news is that my tent wasn't the tent with the duck poo in it" we laughed and I said "well, my not so good news is that my tent WAS the tent with the duck poo". It was so funny.

Needless to say, besides the stink of the lake/ducks, the noisy trains, the freezing cold, going to sleep at 3:00 a.m. and waking up at 6:00 to cook everyone breakfast...it was a BLAST!! I was glad I participated as I should have.

Oh, and the trains part is that we were about 100 yards from a train track and apparently there was a road crossing a mile away from the campsite, so every 30 minutes or so when a train would pass by, it would blare its horn right as it paralleled out camp site. of course! no sleep for this little one :)

SO there's my entertainment from my weekend. I hope you found something in there amusing.