Be prepared.

I was a boy scout for about a month. When we went to our first retreat on a hiking trail, I began to smell the succulent scent of shish kabobs wafting down from a different campsite.

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This was a public campground after all. I left my mates to go search for the smell and I found it coming from a little campfire surrounded with cool pop up tents and being manned by a long haired guy and a couple of really hot girls.

The guy was standing next to the fire turning shish kabobs over and over, with a cooler full of beer and a different cooler full of cokes and RC Cola at his foot.

The two girls were wearing tiny bikinis as they sunbathed in lawn chairs with little mirrors in front of their faces. I can tell you that I wasn't too young to appreciate that kind of thing.

The campers seemed really amused at the fact that a little boy scout had showed up to their fun pow wow, so they invited me to have shish kabobs and drink as many Cokes as I wanted to.

I ended up spending the night in these strange campgrounds. I had my own little pup tent and I had a great view of everything a kid my age would have wanted to see.

To this day that was probably my very favorite camping experience. My scoutmaster did not appreciate me leaving.

The other kids had to eat canned soup that they cooked over crappy fires while I was eating shish kabobs over a roaring fire and drinking probably something like 15 Cokes with some strangers..... two of which were girls right out of a fantasy magazine.

Needless to say things did not go over very well. I didn't really want to learn how to rough it anyway.

I really wished at the time that there was some kind of an organization where you could go camp with strangers and their are beautiful girlfriends, but instead you got these little groups of boys that wanted to do fly fishing activities and make little craft figures. Not really the most fun you can imagine having.

They told my mom that I wasn't a good fit for the scouts, and made me get all of my stuff and leave.

To be honest it wasn't a big loss for me because I was never really into it to begin with. Still, I look back on those memories fondly. I think that guy was actually kind of a badass, although in this day and age it's probably a lot more inappropriate than it was back then.

The scouts was really fun for me. I was always prepared to have a good time. I just wasn't prepared to actually rough it the way that they wanted to.

Be prepared.