Blog III

The third Monday trip with the Norwegians was all about navigation and compass. Again, we met up at the fireplace near campus. We all brought out compasses and maps and were divided into small groups. In order for the following competition to be fair, we were told to line up according to our knowledge about map and compass. The “best educated” ones teamed up with the “least educated” ones in the field of navigating. The were all given some coordinates and told to get to these coordinates in our group, take a picture, proving that we actually found the spots and return to the fireplace afterwards. The funniest and most creative pictures would win in the end.

Having done a fair amount of hiking using maps and having been explained by Len how to use a compass I was confident claiming to have a basic skill of navigating and so was teamed up with equally experienced guys.

We started chatting about what kind of experience we had in navigating. At some point I took over the lead and navigated us towards the first point. Along the way we met to other groups who also had to go in roughly the same direction so we walked together. Funnily we all took the same wrong way and ended up having to cross someone’s backyard and climb a hill to get to the first point. After we also had reached the second checkpoint we all decided that since our first picture was neither creative nor really funny, that we wouldn’t need to try in the first place because we wouldn’t get first place anyways.  So, we simply took a plain selfie and walked back to the fireplace. We were among the first groups to return which felt quite good because it meant that we probably did a good job finding and navigating to the checkpoints. When everyone had returned we all send the pictures to on of the Norwegians who led the whole trip for them to be ranked.

In order to practice some more navigating we played another sort of game. One group had to hide something for another group for them to find using only the grade on of the compass as well as the distance they were given. After that rounded up the Monday trip we gathered together, the winner of the first challenge was announced and we evaluated the trip. All were pretty content with the selection of the tasks and everybody apparently had good fun.

Due to an exam I had to sit for my home uni, this was the last Monday trip from the Norwegians I would participate in.