This weekend trip was an experience to say the least, I started by turning up slightly later than everyone else because of personal errands to then not find the rest of the group, going round the whole island once, to find the campsite to be near the beginning regardless. This made me angry, but thankful because the island wasn’t too big to tire me out.

Because the group was waiting for me, they hadn’t been hiking yet, so we all decided to set off, me for the second time, around the island. The island, Odderøya is quite a beautiful place to walk regardless of the weather because it is right next to the coast. It has many areas to climb, bolder and just have a general play around, especially for children.

When we stopped hiking we made the fire for the evening, as most people needed it for their tea. The wind started to pick up pretty badly at this point so the fire didn’t last much longer after that, at this point we decided to go into our tents and talk in there.

The night sleep was eventful, I woke up several times to rain and wind bringing the tent down, at around 0200 hours the tent collapsed and water started to creep in, I still managed to doze till around 0530 hours, when I rolled over to find that the whole tent had flooded and I was in fact soaked through. It was decided that we would abandon ship and pack up early. The rain was coming down pretty hard at this point but luckily we put up camp near a WW2 memorial site that had a little alcove to which we could place our stuff under while we packed away.

This was definitely a learning curve for us and we will need to invest in a fool proof way of waterproofing ourselves as the tent didn’t do a very good job, and most importantly, checking the weather before even thinking about camping out anywhere.