We decided to plan an overnight hiking/camping trip around the island Odderøya, which is connected by bridge to downtown Kristiansand. This was my first time visiting the island and I was really excited. We decided we wanted to hike straight across the island on the main road first so we could get to the old battlements and look for a place to camp in that area. By the time we got there and were hunting around a bit for a good location I realized that my favorite water bottle from back home was gone! I had got it at a Women in Computing Conference, it was red and said Microsoft Geek Girl on it, which I loved. I was devastated. I spent an hour carefully retracing my steps and going back to the place we met before the bridge, where I last had it, and it was gone! So now I was out of water for the rest of the trip which sucked big time.

On the way down I passed one of my group mates who arrived late and told her where everyone was waiting, at the end of the road near the battlements. When I got back I found that she still hadn’t arrived and when we called we found out that she had decided to go and try and find us on the trail and hiked almost the whole way around the island! By this time we were getting a bit tired of waiting and she said it’d take her 40 min to get back to us, so we decided to go ahead and do our hike because it was nearing dusk.

The hike around was beautiful and I marked it on a list of places I wanted to bring my mom if she visited. I really enjoyed how a decent portion of the path was cut out of the rock itself. By the time we got half way done I was really regretting misplacing my water bottle. This was the only time that I had opted not to bring my back up water bottle so I was regretting it even more! One of my group mates had been on the island a few times before and took us through some really cool caves on the island and secret paths and it was very enjoyable.

Afterwards we went back to our tent and I was tired and decided to read in my sleeping bag in the night. The tent was put up when I went to go search for my water bottle and so I trusted that it was set up correctly, but the wind and rain started up in the middle of the night and the tent collapsed on us! Never again will I blindly trust others to do it right, I’ll make sure to always double check on the important stuff. We were cold and miserable at this point, so we just decided to call it a night and we packed up and headed home from there.