Julia's Fifth Grade COE

 Location:  Enchanted Rock in Austin, Texas

Who:  Mason, Grant, and 1/2 of Sparks Advisories

Days:  October 27-29

Julia and I went on the 5th grade COE trip this fall.  It was fun to be able to experience it with her.  I promised that I'd give her some space and did the best I could with that.  It was a very eventful trip.

Julia was in a tent with her friends Maria and Nia.  We divided into three groups and I was one of the adults with Julia's group.  We did the hike on the trail and went up to the top of Enchanted Rock.  It was fairly windy, but beautiful.  I loved being able to have the time with Julia and her friends.  It was very special.

At night we were due for a bad rain storm.  And there wasn't too much we could do other than watch as things came in and then make the best decisions we could.  Before the rain came we had a few students who were homesick and struggling to go to sleep.  I had told them to come see me if they needed anything and expected that one or two might.  Ended up with several throughout the early night.  We'd talk and then look at the wind blowing the tent so they could see what it was that they were hearing as they laid inside their tents.  At one point Veda and Payton came by and were scared.  I got my shoes on and headed out of my tent with my headlamp.  I zipped up my tent and heard a loud "hiss!!!" from the bushes.  It was a little freaky so we headed to one of the picnic tables.  As we sat to talk, one of the girls heard a sound and so I pointed my headlamp out.  These two bright eyes were staring back at me: a raccoon.  We all climbed to the top of the picnic table.  The raccoon began to walk towards us.  I started calling out "Go away... Go AWay... GO AWAY!!"  Thankfully it left (I'm sure it was due to my loud strong voice lol).  

Later in the night the rain came.  I  heard someone yelling "HELP!  HELP!!!!! MRS. GRANT!!!!"  It took me a minute to put on all of my rain gear because it was absolutely pouring and thundering.  I went over to Julia's tent since that's where the yelling was coming from.  Turns out that Julia had been fast asleep.  Nia saw something moving against the tent.  She elbowed Julia and woke her up to tell her something was touching the tent.  Julia looked next to her and saw two paws pushing into the tent.  Nia said "I know what to do" and then punched it.  Turned out it had been a raccoon (likely the really fat one that I had seen earlier in the night).  

In the tent next to them Mirai and Ellis woke up and since everything was wet they decided to join with Julia's tent.  When I checked on their tent, they were all playing a card game (in the middle of the night lol).  The rain was pouring, thunder loud, lightning crazy, but they played cards.  I loved it.

I then went tent to tent to check on the kids and made sure that everyone was ok.  One of the girls' tents was soaked and had puddles inside of it.  When the rain died down a little bit, I moved my bed into Lauren's tent (another adult on the trip) and then the three girls moved into my tent.  I think that all of us got about 3-4 hours of sleep max.

On day 2, Julia spent time learning how to make a fire in a firepit and then did rock climbing.  She was tired, but overall enjoyed the day.  I was in the fire group with her and then took another group on the hike up Enchanted Rock.  There was one student that was nervous about going up to the top (it was definitely more windy than the day before) and I made sure to be with that student.  We had students write in their COE journals and then just check to see if they've written a few pages.  When I checked this student's journal page it said, "Today we hiked to the top of the rock.  My legs were tired.  There was nothing special about it.  Activity rating - 2/10."  I wanted to die laughing.  It was so funny.  Glad our time together was so meaningful lol.

That night we had s'mores by the fire and a very quiet night with no rain and very, very loud coyotes in the distance.  I'm thinking they'd found a kill as they were going crazy and their little ones were cackling.  We drove back to the school and had fun telling stories about the raccoons and the rain.