My first night ever camping was on a DofE expedition, and as I was cooking my dinner the weather turned and I got hailstones in my noodles for my tea. This did not dampen my experience at all, and I went on to get my bronze, silver and gold. During gold, we had an unexpected route change, as during route planning we chose the flattest path (and avoided all of the work shire 3 peaks). After some convincing our leader Tracy and I convinced them that it would be such a great achievement to get our Yorkshire 3 peaks award as well as our gold, so we quickly planned a route, got it approved and off we went (there is a picture of us all, I’m in the red jumper, on the floor). The best part was explaining to our leader why we were over an hour late to a checkpoint after a 15minute sit down in the sunshine turned into a team-wide hour long nap! Oops! I still love DofE so much that I just couldn’t part with it! Now I’m volunteering as a young leader and hoping to become an assessor! Through my work as a young leader, I helped a disabled participant do her bronze expedition and after all the aches and pains and thoughts of giving up, we get to this waterfall right near the end and she just turned to me, hugged me and said thank you. DofE has changed my life and given me skills and experiences I couldn’t have imagined.