Day 5: The Lake

Well. Today was actually a huge step up from the busy work we’ve been doing all week. Today, we returned to the enclosure and dug a trench between the various pole holes from yesterday, as well as finished raking and clearing the pen. We were a little lazy until lunchtime, which went incredibly well with our leftover rotisserie chicken and tortilla wraps. After lunch, we got right to it. I got my first experience in mixing and pouring cement, and I’m sure my back will not be agreeing with me in the morning. As if I wasn’t sore enough already! We mixed the concrete and poured it into the holes, along with the poles we grabbed from the opposite side of the reserve. We did this literally for the remainder of the day. Once again, I got fried. If I take my shirt off, you wouldn’t know it, because my v-neck left me with some nice tan lines.

We stuck to our plan to go to the lake to make supper tonight. I was hoping to make our rinse off time short so that we could get to the lake as fast as possible, but with 22 girls, you can about guess how that would go. I singlehandedly walked to Food Lion and picked up enough charcoal, hamburgers, hotdogs, veggie burgers, and buns for 23 people with 5 different payment cards within 20 minutes. That was about my limit as far as stress went for tonight. We pulled out of the hotel parking lot at about 6:15pm and realized that the lake closed at 8. With charcoal but no lighter fluid or spatula, we started to see that we may have had a problem on our hands. We were going to have to make this speedy.

We got to the camp site and dumped our charcoal into the grills. Throwing in any pine needles, paper, and sticks we could find, we managed to start some small flames on two of the grills. Hopefully the amount of heat it was giving off would eventually start the charcoal and heat up our food. While we worked on the grills, the rest of the group went to check out the lake. We threw the food on the grills with quite a few mishaps. At one point, the foil started on fire. Our short little sticks that we were using to flip the burgers was having a hard time peeling off the burger from the flaming foil, and a patty or two might have been seasoned with some dirt.

The sun had set, but we were still going at it. We were all feeling rushed for time, seeing as how we arrived at the lake at 7 and it closed at 8. Everyone was pretty frantic, but unselfish at the same time. We all worked together and gave food others before feeding ourselves. I even managed to buy some shortbread cookies and marshmallows, even if it was a little too difficult to attempt to make any s’mores. As 7:58 rolled around, someone reminded us that the gates would be closing at 8. Never in my life have I seen one group of people work so fast. In less than one minute, all of the loaves of bread, bags of chips, condiments, and sides had been packed into bags and shoved into our trunks, and you better believe we were on our way out of those gates at 8pm.

The days themselves are no doubt the most stressful of my life. Hard labor, being in charge of a large group of people and their meals, I am surprising myself everyday with how much I am able to handle. These girls (and Chris!) surprise me every day with how kind and loving they are. It blows my mind that a group of people who were strangers just a few days ago are able to argue like siblings and work together like friends. It’s the little things like this that give me hope in the world.

I’m not 100% sure about the meals tomorrow, but I think we have the room reservation cancellations covered, so I’m going to take it easy tonight. I deserve it, right? J

#CTR