To read part eighteen of day thirteen, click here.

When I woke up the next morning, everyone was still asleep. I slipped out of my sleeping bag, being careful to not step on anyone, and went to the bathroom. Then I crawled back into my sleeping bag.

A couple of minutes later, Bruce’s watch alarm went off, waking everybody else. We didn’t immediately rush to get up, we just sat around talking. We did a lot of talking the last two days. 😀

We eventually got up and got dressed, packing all of our stuff (ALL of it) into our Happy Sacks (our massive garbage bags that kept things from getting wet), because our backpacks had already been de-issued.

We started walking from our platform back to the De-Issue area. Along the way the bags started getting annoying – we were just carrying big garbage bags, but they had all of our personal gear, our sleeping bags, and our water bottles/eating gear, so they were really heavy.

“I never thought I’d say this, but I want my pack back.”

“Me too! This is awful!”

“Seriously. Who’d’ve thought that these things would be so bad?”

I didn’t say anything – I was focusing on not letting my pack fall. It was a lot harder than it seemed!

We (finally!) arrived at the De-Issue buildings and started washing our things. We were each given our Outward Bound t-shirts and told to pull out our journals.

“Take your letter to yourself and your bucket list that you wrote on Solo and put them in one of these envelopes. Address it to yourself and give it back to me. We’ll send it to you six months after your course.”

One of my crewmates sat down next to me and said “Um, Brett? Do you know how to format an address label?”

*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.*