Good Morning!

I'm just back from a weekend camping trip with our Webelos den. After Woodbadge, my co-patrol leader and I thought it would be a good idea to get our two dens to camp together, so this was the payoff weekend.

We did the usual things....hiked into the site, made big fires, taught everyone knife and ax safety, did some elaborate camp cooking, and of course had a bigtime campfire Saturday night.

Even though we were within sight of downtown Boston, and we were surrounded by cellphone towers, we managed to elicit the feel of being 'away from home'. To be sure, I had a few phone calls out there, and I posted a few status updates on facebook, but for the most part my phone stayed in my tent, and it was very easy to forget the outside world was still there.

I found that to be strangely liberating this weekend. I've always been a news hound, and for the most part these days if I go an hour without checking the headlines, I tend to feel out of touch. I went an entire weekend without knowing what was going on out there...and there was really no pressure to find out.

We also try to stress that to our scouts. We've had a longstanding rule about no electronics in the woods. That's not what we're out there for. It's the old Wii argument...when I was a kid, we used to go up the hill and play *actual* kickball with our friends; we didn't sit indoors and manipulate a video controller. (At least until the Atari 2600 came out.)

Ah, but this morning I'll need to get back to my digital life. I did check the headlines yesterday when I got back, and my online reader had over 800 stories to catch up with. I did peek into Facebook but not Google plus, and I'm afraid to look into my email.

It's certainly interesting to think back....what did we do before the internet?