One week ago, my friends I decided to go camping in the nearby forest.

The weather seemed

great. We packed our bags and left at 6 a.m. eventually, we got tired of walking and decided to
just settle down for a while. My friend Lucas packed out the food for everyone. He had brought
some granola bars. It was disgusting, though! I could taste the mold while chewing on the bar.
After that awful experience, we decided to carry on walking. We went on and on until we
reached a nice valley. My friends decided to settle there until tomorrow. I immediately thought
that was a very bad idea, considering there were no trees or any kind of shelter nearby. The
camping tents were either broken or we couldn’t figure out how to build them. When we finally
finished building them, I realized that we did everything wrong. That was not how a normal tent
would look like. We had to go with it, though, because we didn’t have a lot of time. The sun was
already setting, and we had no wood, no fire, and no proper shelter. Fortunately, we managed to
gather some wood, but lighting them up was another story! I tried to start a fire, but as soon as
the fire touched the paper, wind would blow towards it and put it out. After a good 20 minutes,
the fire finally started. I got some canned food and marshmallows from my backpack. The food
was very delicious. We played games, told some scary stories, prank-called people, and
basically, we were just having a lot of fun. Then it was getting late, so we decided to go to bed.
The bed was uncomfortable, and I was barely sleeping. At exactly 4 a.m., it started raining, it
was a severe thunderstorm. The weather was going from bad to worse. The cold water was
getting through our tents. We got all wet, so we decided to pack up immediately and find some
shelter. There was nothing nearby, just a tiny tree, which would not be enough for us. After
walking 30 minutes in the rain, we finally found a cave to sleep in. We settled, but no one could
sleep because of the freezing temperature inside the cave. As soon as the rain stopped, we headed
back home. We were all very wet and cold, and some of us caught a fever. The experience from
this camping trip was awful. I never want to go camping again.

Nikoloz Macharashvili – HMC 2