Priesthood Campout at Fort Pulaski

The weekend before last I went camping at Fort Pulaski with the priesthood brethren.  Despite being in January it was really good weather for camping.  I arrived at sunset and the view back towards Savannah from the bridge to Fort Pulaski was very pretty.  When I got there everyone was gathered around the fire making hobo dinners.  To be honest, I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a nicer dinner ready, but I was surprised when a pulled out my hobo dinner from the fire and it was delicious.  So delicious, in fact, that I made a second.  And I was delighted to find that there was stuff to make smores with.

After dinner, everyone gathered around to sing a few church songs and to share a spiritual thought.  It caught me off guard that they were doing this, even though I should have expected it, but I was glad they were.  It’s not necessarily the type of thing that guys would gather round the fire to do which is why it was nice that it was a priesthood camp out.  We had Ben Clark play the guitar to accompany us singing and also had a special number on the harmonica.  Charles Jensen shared a spiritual thought relating the battle at Fort Pulaski to the battle in our spiritual lives.

After the spiritual thought and music, a few of the adults and a few of the boys walked over to the tunnels outside of the fort at night.  Some of the leaders had enjoyable time frightening the boys by throwing rocks into the woods and making them think there something out there.  One of the guys got a coke at the vending machine with his credit card, at which time some of the boys started hitting the buttons.  Not understanding that the transaction with the man’s credit card was still open, they started yelling, “this machine’s giving out free cokes!” when two more cokes came out.  I wasn’t there to see it, so I just thought Daniel really like coke when I saw him with three of them, but when he explained it I thought that was pretty hilarious.

It had been a while since I’ve been camping, so I was worried I might not sleep very well, but it turned out I slept pretty well.  I woke up a few times early in the morning, listening for sounds of breakfast being made and debating whether I should get out of my tent to go to the bathroom.  After drifting in and out of sleep for a little while I decided that even though I hadn’t heard breakfast being made I should go ahead and get up.  I was really excited about having breakfast being made without having been asked to contribute.  When I finally peered out of my tent, to my astonishment of the campground was deserted.  They had already left to start the service project without me.

With camping hair I went off to meet them.  Luckily I had turned my phone off to save enough battery power for at least one call, but I hadn’t anticipated that it would be a help everyone left me I don’t know where to go call.  When I met up with them, there wasn’t much left to do, so I walked with them as they picked trash up on the outer dike surrounding Fort Pulaski.  In his spiritual thought the night before, Charles had told us about how the union army had defeated Fort Pulaski we have the newly invented rifle canon.  It was very cool to see that the battered wall of the fort that they had destroyed from a mile away on Tybee Island.