To read part fifteen of day nine, click here.

Bruce was shaking my shoulder, trying to get me to wake up.

“Brett, you’ve got to get up. C’mon – I’ve got to go wake up the other guys. Brett? Brett!”

My voice sounded strange, almost fuzzy. It was weird. “I’m awake. What time is it?”

“It’s six. Remember, that’s what time we were supposed to get up? You’ve got to wake up the other girls so we can get ready.”

I had only gotten three hours of sleep. I couldn’t believe it. I shook my head quickly to wake up and thanked him. He walked back to his tarp and woke up the guys while I woke up the girls.

We all packed up our gear and went to find Katie and Jen. Katie was stirring up a big pot of oatmeal. That made me really happy – it was good oatmeal. It was best with brown sugar…

“Hey Katie? Do we have any brown sugar to go with the oatmeal?”

“Yep, we’ve got more than we had last time.”

Everyone who heard her grinned in anticipation. We all searched for our food bags in the pile – we wanted to get our bowls and spoons so we could eat!

When we were done eating, we put our bowls and spoons into a pile near the food bags. Everyone sat back down in a circle so we could talk about solo.

Someone started whispering. “I’m really nervous about this. A whole day alone? I’m going to sneak over to Maggie’s place and we’ll hang out.”

“We’ll get in trouble, but I don’t care. It’s going to be freaky.”

The whispering stopped when Jen came back from wherever she had gone.

“Ok, I need everyone’s attention. These are the things you need to do while you are on solo.”

Katie handed her a notebook.

“Everyone, pull out your journal. These are your solo assignments. You will want to write them down.

The first one – journal about the image of yourself that you think you given the crew. How do you think they see you?

The second one – write yourself a letter to be torn out and sent to you in six months, and include a bucket list with at least eight things on it.

The third (and last) one is an exercise we like to call give and take. Write everyone’s name down in your journal, and think about that person. Then you need to give each person a quality that you think would benefit them. And once you have done that, take a quality from them that you would like for yourself.”

Click here to read the next part of Day Ten.

*Everything here is from my own memory and may not be correct. Outward Bound is not responsible for anything I post here. Thanks too NCOBS for letting me use their photos.*