Re-cap all the way back to Monday 29th July

And on the programme - Hikes, the Sun was shining with a vengance, so the main task was to make sure that the Scouts all had plenty of water, suncream hats etc etc. and once breakfast was out of the way, we made our way to the Hike team tent for instructions....

 A few months before the Haarlem Jamboree we were required to submit ( some) of our activity preferences, just before that we had a pre-camp at Kibblestone with those going to the Haarlem jamborette in order to ask what activities they preferred  these choices were then assigned grades of 1 for most preferred to 3 for least, and following the Kibblestone precamp we entered these choices into the group registration/activity preferences section on the main Haarlem jamborette website.

The hike choice was relatively straight forward, one of the rules were that Leader(s)/responsible adults (?) had to acompany the Scouts on the hike, the hike choices this time round were split into three:

 City Hike - Bus to  Leiden departing at 08:30am from gate C, route with a few puzzles, games etc as it trails it way round the old university city roughly 8km long

Punisher Hike: 40Km+ billed as a Long and challenging route, departing from Gate C at 07:00, with an additional rule that groups must have passed/signed in at one of the checkpoints at 16:00 (4pm) or be retired and bussed back to camp, a video from the vloggerrs of the punisher is below: ( they did it on a rainy day )

And the Third option was the Escape room hike at about 20k, which was a circular route, no early busses to catch, and no need to rush, the only complication was in order to progress puzzles had to be solved in the route book.

There was the option of shortening the punisher to 30k  or doing the whole thing which could have been decided mid route, however the 6am wake up call  in the context of the Haarlem Jamborette with the early starts ( 7am) , active all day,/late finishes ( back on site by 11:15pm - sometimes later) meant that we went for the more relaxed start ( if you can call it that)  that the Escape room hike afforded.

So all kitted up, water bottles ready to be filled off we went to Team Hikes, and this is where we were presented with the Escape Hike, a few extracts form the book below

;

Most of the Hike seemed to go OK, we didnt get too lost ( thanks to google maps), and when we got to the checkpoint at the railway station we took a little detour, the option was to go round the town of Zwannenberg nad follow another route, that took us towards the shopping area, another diversion took us into the shopping area, where despite it being a strange supermarket, they managed to home in on the hariobos,

Once back on site, there was one final puzzle to solve

Evening meal done, then Mokkie then bed, and that was it for the hikes day