Clowne Methodist Church Youth Fellowship MAYC Group

‘Splashout’ - Hatfield Water Park, August 2007

With the absence of an official MAYC weekend this year, we decided to spend three days at Hatfield, near Doncaster instead. As with two years previously, we used Sheila and David’s Caravan as a base and feeding station but slept in tents.

So, on Tuesday the 28^th of August, the group of five teenagers and two adults, along with a second car driven by Margaret (most of the boot space taken up by Sam’s kit) departed from Clowne Methodist Church for the hour long journey to Hatfield.

On arrival the tents were immediately broken out with an informal competition being announced between the sexes. The girls eventually won, putting their tent up first but only, I might add, after they stole the mallet from the boy’s team and true to form the group sat down for dinner, leaving David to sort the Caravan awning on his own.

After dinner Luke had to leave as he had a previous appointment at work, leaving brother James at the mercy of the other half of the group; Sam, Alex and Rebekah. Shortly after, there was a rather competitive football match on the field adjoining the campsite which resulted in Sam beating everybody and James, in a long standing MAYC tradition, milking any injury which was unfortunate enough to fall upon him.

After everyone recovered, they were off to a nearby Restaurant, ‘The Hatfield Chase’ where a good meal was had by all with the exception of Rebekah who had to wait an overly long time for her vegetarian main course.

On returning, it was decided to have an early night in preparation for the morning’s activities and amidst this, Luke returned from work.

The next morning, the boys were up bright and early and so were Sheila and David who immediately started breakfast, on the other hand, the girls had to be woken up a matter of minutes before breakfast was served, which, by the way, was a double menu as Rebekah required vegetarian sausage which seemed a better alternative to fighting James and Luke for the “real” bacon and sausage.

After breakfast, the group walked down to the lake for their morning’s kayak tuition. The highlight here being that Luke’s hips were too wide to fit any kayak the instructor threw at him and resulted in him being given an open topped Banana boat which he promptly fell out of. In the rest of the session, James fell out twice, although he was easily able to get back in his kayak. David also fell out and ended up catching half of the vegetation in the lake around his legs, prompting a ‘swamp man’ remark from Emma who had arrived half way through the morning. Sam also fell out and this meant that only Alex and Rebekah were dry on returning to land - which suited Alex but not Rebekah who asked to be taken out into the shallows again and deliberately sunk. This all changed shortly afterwards, however as we were all invited to take part in a jetty jump which does exactly as it says on the tin.

Dinner today was a sweet and sour chicken and again Sheila cooked an alternative meal for our resident vegetarian.

After dinner there was another game of Football, just as competitive as the first with the addition of Pete and Antony who had arrived during the morning, and then some silly games devised by Sheila including Apple Bobbing (which descended into a water fight), paper tower building (which would have been easy if not for the wind) and a rather infuriating game involving building a tower with paper cups where the wind once again featured highly.

The decision was then made to go to the Cinema to see Rush Hour 3 with tea at McDonalds beforehand, where everybody bought a value meal with a free Coca-Cola glass which all ended up in the back of David’s car. So with David’s boot looking like a glass shop, we went to the cinema. Here, as the film was set in Paris, David proceeded to point out every Parisian landmark he had visited in the middle of a high speed car chase.

The following morning the camp began to pack up, but there was still time to play an annoying game that Rebekah had brought with her which was like twister - only more compromising and resulted in some interesting positions which had to be made by the group.

This provided a hilarious ending to an enjoyable few days.

Now that MAYC have finally abandoned Breakout, we are actively looking into doing our own thing again this year (2011) and plans are in hand for a weekend in Blackpool for the church MAYC Group.