Stuff From My Life- 14/06/13

Stuff from my life

14th June 2013

I really don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be the guy that starts a blog just to rail against people who've slighted him in some minor way, but this is one I really need to get out there.

Last Friday, the 14th, I went on a camping weekend, since I hadn't been camping in a long time and I missed it. I'd moved recently and I didn't have a map of the area, but I had Google Maps directions to the campsite which I thought would be enough, I had also left my phone and mp3 player behind to try to leave the world behind for a while. In retrospect of course all those things were very stupid and I fully accept that the situation I found myself in was entirely of my own making.

The plan was to take a bus almost all the way there and walk the last few miles. I missed the last in a series of buses which only ran every three hours or so and decided to walk it, but when I finally got to the right village in the middle of Kent, I couldn't find it, and no-one had heard of it, so I ended up just wandering around, and at this point I'd like to put on record that I was carrying a tent, sleeping bag, cooking utensils, gas stove, and food and clothes for three days on my back. Eventually it got dark and I'd been walking for about seven hours at this point, with about a third of my own body weight strapped to me, sustained by Fruit and Nut Dairy Milk and a 2 litre bottle of Evian, and I stumbled across some kind of hostel.

At the hostel I met some people who hadn't heard of where I was going either, so I turned to leave, naturally at this point a little exasperated, tired and annoyed, so I sighed in frustration and started to storm off. I admit it was a little rude but I feel at least slightly justified in that.

Anyway, as I was leaving one of the guys at the hostel shouted that he would have looked up the location on his phone for me, but because I hadn't been perfectly polite to him, I could piss off, those were his exact words, "piss off".

About ten minutes later, I was walking down a road, and the same guy drove past me in his car (and this would have been about 11 at night at this point), slowed down to tell me he would have helped me had I not been rude to him, and drove off.

About another ten minutes later I met an older man in the street who did help me, actually took me into his home (now it was approaching midnight) and let me look up directions on his own computer. It turned out that the campsite was not, in fact, in or near the village itself but on the other side of the district named after it, fortunately the path there was pretty straightforward. I eventually got to the campsite about 1:30 in the morning, put up my tent and passed out. Apart from that it was an okay trip.

Both these men were total strangers and I don't even know their names, but all I can say is it just goes to show that, while most people are basically good, some people are just dicks.