This past weekend I attended my 4th Halloween Camp that's put on by a local search & rescue team.
I volunteer on a SAR team, so I've worked with, trained with and have been trained by the director of K9 One many times. So she knew of my love of Halloween, and when she asked if I wanted to attend back in 2020, I had no idea what it was, but I said YES! Now I make sure to keep my calendar open every year just for this.
Pat called me Friday night and asked if some of my skeletons could come play, too
This year's theme was a loose Indiana Jones / Egyptian type thing.
The story of the weekend was some girls came to the camp after homecoming. They heard screaming, went to investigate, saw a mummy and they scattered.
Pat expects Chuck to be there, so he gets his own name tag!
Since the 12 people there come from various SAR teams around Michigan and even Indiana, we had a team building exercise, literally! We had to come up with a back story of our last archeological dig and build the site. My team's Temple of Horus is in the middle.
This guy was really quiet, too!
I'm sure there was a story behind this guy, but I missed what it was.
Random pretty flower!
9 out of the 12 people attending had K9s so I sat out of the relay race / obstacle course.
But we got to meet (and be drooled on) this awesome bloodhound named Bojangles.
Dawson going to get clues for the "search" we had to go on!
The clue was a set of coordinates and a note that said to find an arm and a ring.
I took this because the rainbow was so pretty, but...
the beach is divided into sectors with "mummies' buried in the sand. Inside each mummy is some real human remains, so the HRD (aka cadaver) dogs had to look for them.
We also had a fear factor type dinner challenge.
The winning team ended up being the team whose members refused the fewest dishes!
The smoked oysters, sardines & olives with Vienna sausages didn't go over well.
I choked down an entire plate of green olives - and had the worst heartburn all night & the next day!
After dinner & a game of Jeopardy (topics were maps, search strategies, scent theory, etc)
was everyone's favorite game - the building search!
There's a room set up with all sorts of knick-knacks & various items you'd find in a haunted house, spiderwebs & strobe lights & fog. Each team got a list of 8 things. We'd have to basically memorize the list and did a relay going in to get one item at a time. To add to the difficulty - we were only allowed one red light per team. Red lights are the only way to see thru the strobes.
It's a lot of fun.
We did a night search based on the scenario of the weekend.
My headlamp has a UV light setting, which made the leaves looks really cool.
I went out to support one of the dogs from Indiana & his handler and as always, fascinating to watch a dog's nose at work. My job was to make sure they didn't fall off a cliff, use the radio and make sure we stayed in our sector.
We got done with festivities around 1:30am Sunday morning.
I shared a cabin with a girl who has a HRD dog and at one point I woke up and opened my eyes to see Tucker approximately 2 inches from my nose, staring at me! I'm sure he knew I was still alive, but he must have been checking anyway.
Sunday we had to be out of the camp by 8am and not be back until 10am, so we all went out to breakfast.
In front of a random house along the way to the restaurant.
Awesome!
The weather was much nicer Sunday. Saturday, we dealt with wind & occasional sprinkles. Sunday we just had wind and around 55*.
Going back to the original story - we were assigned sectors and had to go out searching for the missing girls & also mummies.
The wind played havoc on my big skeletons! The wind blew them both off the wall and sadly, this guy's leg got broken off at the knee.
It was a busy weekend!
I didn't leave the camp until after 5pm because I stuck around to help pick up.
If you come home without being sore all over - you didn't play enough!
OMG that sounds like an amazing time! Props to that random house that had a D&D Beholder out front
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