DofE was one of the best experiences I had while I was at school. I did both bronze and silver awards while attending King Ethelbert School. Both started like any other camping trip, lots of energy and excitement challenging ourselves to beat the other groups to the campsite forgetting how far 20km is.

But on the final day we see the girls team ahead of us close to the final destination and we notice they are a little lost so we gained ground and past them. Excited by our achievement there’s hope in our steps and we were close the end of the journey. Standing in a field, we noticed the girls go right, but we believed that the correct way was left so we continued. It wasn’t until 2 hours later we found a little village with the sign reading ‘best small village in 2015’, we check the map and we had been going the wrong way. We was a whole village over from the one we was supposed to go to. So while we had been singing songs together and making our way thinking the girls had gone the wrong way and we was close to the finish, we had gotten lost and now had to walk another 2 hours in the other direction. We get to the pub where we were to meet our family’s and the girls were all sitting down having a drink being debriefed while we had blisters climbing our ankles, sweat dripping from our noses and eyebrows. It’s safe to say the majority of our team wasn’t happy that we extended our walk by another 4 km. I still say it was the more scenic route I took them on.