Hello again.

Essex International Jamboree.

21st July to 3rd August 2008.

We went off to another Jamboree in Essex.  J-W had to pack a lot on Sunday, and finished it off on the Monday morning.  Took about 5 hours to get there, including going shopping in Guildford on the way.  We went on a bus, a train, two tube trains, two trains that seemed to think they were cable cars and then we got picked up in a pickup truck. We were camping in the WSJ tent, which seems to be changing.  The red printed bits are now a pinkish white!  J-W says this is due to the tent always facing the sun, due to him pitching it that way at the WSJ and the other camps.

We found Vix who is a Gojammer and Scottish on the first day there.

J-W was helping with the build from Tuesday to Friday.  I was supervising him and the work teams he was with. I got a bit worried as he was driving the Pickup Trucks around the farm.  At one time he said he had a pig in the open bit.  All I could see was a 8 foot long metal tank with water tap points down both sides!  One of these 'Pigs' had broken the weld and was making  a fountain.  So J-W and crew took this thing over and helped change it and bring the dead one back.  J-W did  a lot of water pipe work including digging them into the ground.  He also moved hundreds of tables and chairs around the site.  He was loaned out to Security at one point on the Friday, as all their stuff were being trained.  He got to sit in the control room for an hour or more eating biscuits!

We were by the Big Blue Wet Thing (J-W: he means sea) near Clacton-On-Sea.  The places have funny names.  We got off the train at Thorpe-Le-Soken and were in the village of Kirby-Le-Soken.

One of the kids in the second week, did ask J-W about if they were near the Big Blue Wet Thing (sea) and J-W said "See that bank at the end of the field, well it's called a Sea Wall!", and got the reply " Oh so the seas behind it?"

On the Saturday when the camp site became a car park, J-W was raking the grass up as the grass was cut down from about my height to an inch or so, where the targets and nets would be.  This went on for hours. The archery range they made was twenty metres from targets to the shooting line, and we had thirty bases on the line, but no zippy lenght bows.  Some small bows were made later in the week!

We met lots of the Go-Jammers.  Saw Becky and Plop a lot, Mary and Colin, and all of the Rangers with Merry and Co.  Saw most of the Bugs and the Beaver who was with the Rangers, who I meet last year.  I got a badge from the Rangers.  J-W also put a badge on my blanket, a Dutch Archery instructor gave him.  Also I got my 75 nights badge sown on my blanket.  J-W seems to thing it was funny that I kept getting stuck upside down in a lot of different beer glasses.  He would not believe I was helped by the Gojammers some of the time.

When we left we got a lift out to the station with Vix and her friend and two others, so we all got the same train down to Liverpool Street Station. So the five humans took up about eight seats in the end due to the bags not fitting inthe luggage racks.  The train got packed due to a Footy match in London.  Vix was taking one of the bugs home, so I got to talk to someone on my higher brain power level.  Took less tha five hours to get back, not bad as the trains and buses are lazy on a Sunday.

13 nights away, so that's 83 nights away.