Our last day began long before dawn. One bus full of scouts had left late last night after the closing stage show and more would begin to arrive at the Ruby Welcome Center when they opened at 5:00 am. That meant that they would arrive in our camp by 5:30 am. I had asked my tent mate, Bob, who was a early riser, to wake me by five, but I woke up when he was getting dressed at 4:00 am and decided I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep. I got up, got dressed, did the usual morning things, and headed to breakfast. Breakfast, by this point, was wearing a little thin. I was in the Army Reserve for ten years. I know how to doctor up institutional eggs to make them palatable, but the dining hall had run out of hot sauce several days earlier. Moreover, most breakfast foods were the same from day to day, or repeated every few days, and it was all starting to get old, especially when, for no discernible reason, my entire breakfast was served cold for the last few days. Still, it was more than I made for myself at home, so my complaints are really only halfhearted in this regard and I remain enormously grateful for the staff that fed us every day.

After breakfast, I picked out my take away lunch selections and headed back to camp. Once there, I checked in to see if I was needed anywhere, and then began packing up my gear and moving my truck closer to my tent for loading, and for my secondary objective of rescuing food and other useful items from the trash. A little background may be necessary here. As I watched the final day in previous Jamborees, a great many things are left behind. Exactly what is left varies from year to year, particularly as the population of scout troops vary in how they arrived, whether that be by plane, train, bus, car caravan, or whether they brought a troop trailer with them. But no matter how they plan to get home, there are things that just don’t “make the cut” for being worthwhile to take home. Troops that will fly home won’t be able to take much at all with them, those who rented buses can take a little more but are still, by necessity, fairly selective, while troops with their own trailers can take home almost anything that they want. But, at the end of the day, forty seven troops are going to leave behind a lot of stuff. I have seen the contents of that pile of stuff include everything from tents to (lots of) lost water bottles, and always a discouraging amount of food.

And so, for the next several hours, I patrolled between our office tent and the dumpster, picking out discarded things and intercepting scouts with wagons full of perfectly good food. To be fair, you need to understand that during the Jamboree, each morning troops would come to the commissary tent and draw food for the day, but at the end of the day any and all unused food was to be returned to the commissary or turned in at a tent next door for donation to local food pantries. But… there were exceptions. Perishable foods, such as fresh fruits and some meats, could not be returned because they could not be legally accepted by food pantries in West Virginia. Fortunately, I was under no such restraint and so, I redirected as much of this as I could to the back of my pickup truck. On several occasions I meant to get a photo but got busy and forgot each time. Still, by the time the last troop of scouts departed, I had collected a bunch of practically new 2 x 4 boards, five large soup pots, a mostly new plastic bucket from Lowe’s, five or six boxes of oranges, a half a box of apples, several plastic totes of various sizes, a full set (or more) of plastic mixing bowls with lids, a bunch of water bottles, about ten boxes of snacks and lunch items from jerky to chips, to nuts and cereal bars, as well as a couple reams of paper, a stapler, staples, mosquito repellent wrist bands, and a bunch of other stuff.

By noon, Josh and I had repacked and loaded everything in my truck and covered it all with my bungee cargo net, said our goodbyes to the people who had become our Jamboree family, and began our trip home. But first, we drove up the hill to take a photo (above) of our empty camp after our village of two-thousand scouts and scout leaders had departed. After an hour or two on the road we stopped for lunch at Wendy’s rather than eat more of the trail food we’d had for two weeks, filled up on gas, refilled on caffeine, and continued north. Sometime later, we unexpectedly lost a lane to construction (I might have been a little tired) and, while I successfully avoided all of the orange traffic cones, there was, apparently, a sign that stuck out into our lane a bit farther that the cones, and as we passed, it reached out an bit my rear-view mirror. No other damage, but I will need to buy a replacement for that on Ebay this week. In any case, we arrived home safely by dinner time, were welcomed in my driveway by my lovely wife Patti, and the smiling, laughing greeting of our grandson. We sent some oranges home with Josh and his parents and unloaded all of the food before dark to keep neighborhood critters from helping themselves.

After carrying all of my stuff to my room, the remainder of my evening was pleasantly spent sitting in my recliner and babysitting the little guy.

By ten o’clock, our grandson was asleep and, having been awake since 4:00 am, I was completely exhausted and fell into bed.

I think that I may add one more post to this series to fill out a few details and wrap up a few loose ends so stay tuned. Otherwise, you are welcome to hang around because this is where I post my weekly sermons, monthly newsletter articles, and other more occasional writing projects. If that appeals to you, I invite you to hit the subscribe button that appears on this page.

Let’s meet here again soon.

Blessings,

Pastor John.