#camped12

On Friday night, I left work early so that myself and @teakayb could begin the 3 and a half hour trip to #CampEd12 oop north in Oxenhope, near Halifax. I have a tendency for signing myself up for random educational events all over the place (last year I flew to Ireland for LOB11) but this time was a bit different as I'd managed to convince @teakayb to come with me (he is a teacher too but generally doesn't like talking shop in his free time). I was a little apprehensive about how he would find it, worrying that he wouldn't enjoy it - I don't know what I was worrying about though as he had a great time - phew!!

The wonderful view

@dughall and @joga5 kicked off the event properly on the Saturday afternoon, but not before we had climbed 'the hill' several times transporting @teakayb's numerous telescopes down to the site - thank you @pallman1 for helping!! After the introduction we were straight into activities with myself and @JOHNSAYERS running a mission explore workshop. We sent people off with various missions, books and random 'equipment' such as chalk and crayons to explore the locality. We also set a couple of on the spot challenges too. John set up a blog to collect the few bits people made here: http://campedme.posterous.com/

Mission explore kits

Saturday finished with a wonderful barbecue and singalong in the shed before we retired back to our (very noisy) bnb for the night.

Sunday hosted a great range of further workshops - I took part in geocaching with @lordlangley73 which was great fun (and we won ;-) ) and then went on a child-friendly (cough cough!!) moor walk. Once back (and semi-recovered!) I had a go at making some 3D shapes from limping seagulls, a very technical term for an origami-folded shape! The day was finished off with another great meal and the great company of @bevevans22 and her family.

Tom chasing geckos with the geocaching devices

The weekend was fab and one of the best bits was that it was informal and laid back enough to allow lots of time for chatting and the flexibility to drop in and out of workshops. It was great to chat to so many fantastic people from twitter in more than 140 characters and I know there were even more people there that I didn't even work out who they were. I think the only downside was that there were so many great workshops and not enough time to go to them all.

Massive thanks must go to Dughall, Bill and Helen for organising everything and to Helen's mum, Sue, who allowed us all to take over her fields and barn for the weekend. It was a fab event and here's hoping for a #camped13