Source National Scout Camp
I was a Boy Scout back in 1975, Siempre Listo, Always Ready, in town we had one troop with four patrols, that was it. We used to hike all around the surrounding areas of town but I never had a night out, it was just go and come back the same day. I remember once we where on a bend in the river and we heard a rumbling noise, it was a flash flood. First time, I think the only time I have ever seen one, we had the stream, it was no more than thirty feet wide, completely normal but about a hundred feet away we could see like a wave about three feet high come tumbling down carrying trees, trunks and other debris and making a lot of noise, we got out of there in a jiffy.
Then in December of that year I had the ultimate experience, I got to go with one patrol to the first ever Jamboree in Honduras, held at the National Scout Camp a few miles up the mountains from the capital Tegucigalpa. Getting there was an odyssey in itself, twelve hour train ride to La Ceiba, catch the Seven pm bus to San Pedro, catch the 2:30 am bus to Tegucigalpa, by the time we got there we were barely able to catch the last bus going to the camp.
Once there, as we were the last ones to arrive we were assigned a camping area which was the farthest away from the main camp were food was distributed. So we had to walk over a kilometer three times a day to get the food, I along with another scout were assigned this job. Now as I said this is mountain country, it is December and it was cold, strong very chilly winds, the only place you could take a bath was in a stream which was ice cold, out of my patrol who came from the hot north of the country nobody bathed during the five days we were there.
The first night I really regretted going there, I had never been out by myself and I felt bad. But the second day things got better and I enjoyed the place, I got to meet a lot of people from all over the country, including one guy from San Pedro who told me he was working towards the interpreter merit badge, he was going for English and he knew nothing, don't think he got it. I won a tshirt in a memory game, I have always been good at that, no merit badges though.
Well it was finally over, on the last day we all just wanted to get out of there, the cold was getting to us, so we started our way back and were home 24 hours later. A good experience, not when it happened but later when you can brag about it.