I spent much of this weekend camping with the boy child and several of his peers at the local boy scout reservation for the fall camporee event. Given the weather (pounding rain Friday night, leading to local power outages and flooding), the senior cubs (which my kid is) ended up, due to both mobile phone confusion and said weather, arriving early Saturday morning rather than Friday night. Thus, we set tents up on wet ground, but not actually in the rain.

Much time was spent rotating between stations for demonstrating scout skills like first aid, wilderness search and rescue, and fire building with flint and steel; and for trying out cool stuff, like paintball, slingshots, and spear “fishing” (throwing bamboo spears at balloons floating on the pond). My particular child only ended up getting separated from the group and lost twice.

These things always have a theme – this one was “M*A*S*H” (one of the kids said, and I quote: “my dad said there used to be a TV show”). There were lots of olive drab t-shirts, a neat little home-made directional pole showing the mileage to the home bases of all the troops present, and displays of military equipment from WWII through the present day, including demilitarized firearms and a couple of Korean War-era JEEPs and trucks, courtesy of Army recruiters and a couple of local collectors. Frankly, given the presence of real, live items like the Kalashnikov AK-47, the M60 machine gun, and the M2HB heavy machine gun (the latter two in emplacements with sandbags, tripod mounts, and dummy ammo belts), I’m surprised the boy didn’t wet himself with excitement.

A good time was had by all, and I’m pretty sure the boys learned something. Heck, I learned things from some of the senior scouts about camp cooking – I have a couple of cool recipes I’m looking forward to trying out in the future.

The coolest part of the weekend, though, was the appearance of an interesting neighborhood creature heretofore unknown to most of us. On Friday night, one of my fellow adult volunteers noticed some strange lights on the ground, as if someone cracked open a glow stick and spattered the interior liquid on the ground around the base of a tree. Upon closer examination, it turned out to be something much cooler – dozens of multi-legged worm-like critters with bioluminescent patches on their bodies!

A bit of research on available smart phones identified these creatures as genus phengodes, the glow worm, the larvae (and larviform female) of a species of beetle, one of the handful of bioluminescent land animals that live in North America. None of us knew these things even existed. But sure enough, they showed up again on Saturday night, which made us all very happy, and amazed at the wonders of nature. Sadly, none of the photos any of us tried to take came out, but imagine the ground covered with about a hundred of these little guys (or ladies, more than likely), each around a half-inch long:

So yeah, that was pretty neat. Saturday night was absolutely gorgeous for sleeping under the stars (ensconced in a tent, of course), with clear skies and a beautiful full harvest moon that was so bright that I had to cover my eyes with a t-shirt in order for it to be dark enough to sleep, and none of us needed flashlights to illuminate our midnight trips to the latrine. Sadly, all our phone and camera batteries were toast, so I wasn’t able to take a picture. Wouldn’t have done it justice anyway.

Yep. Not a bad way to spend a weekend.