Those were the days.

Last night was my twenty year school reunion, which I did not attend. Before you start jumping to conclusions, I would have gone, but two States and a Tuesday 6.30pm time slot stood between me and the school gates. So I stayed home, watched Packed to the Rafters and drank sleepy-time tea, sorry, was it twenty years or fifty ? My memory seems to be failing me.

On the whole I have pretty fond memories of my time at school. I attended the same school for my entire education (can anyone see where the seed of my reluctance to break a routine may have been sown ?) and moved through various circles of friendships during the course of the thirteen years. A few of those friendships have withstood the test of time whilst others simply drifted away.

The twenty year reunion brought back memories of events which occurred during my school years and I thought I would share one of those with you today.

For want of a better title, let's call this one 'Lost'. Or perhaps 'Lost in the Bush,' or maybe even 'Lost in the Bush without Any Supplies for 12 Long, Cold Hours.' No, that will give the whole story away, let's go back to 'Lost.'

It was Grade Six camp and a gentle hike had been scheduled in. Now I don't know how long the hike was actually supposed to take, but I can safely assume that no one counted on twelve hours. Well, in all fairness, only two of us hiked for twelve hours, the others were all safely back at the camp, showering, eating dinner and no doubt telling dramatic tales of their own.

In our defense, it really could have happened to anyone. There was a teacher at the front of the group, introducing us to the finer points of 'power walking' and a teacher at the rear with a cattle dog herding up the stragglers (okay, I made that up, there was no cattle dog, but in hindsight, a cattle dog would have saved us all a lot of trouble).

Because I am an extremely kind soul, with the patience of a Saint (Coach, if you are reading this, please stop laughing immediately) I stopped to wait with Miss K who had picked an extremely poor moment to suffer the misfortune of an untied shoe lace.

That was all it took, when she was done and we looked around, we were alone. The front group had turbo charged onward and upward, the stragglers were probably fawning over a colourful display of mould on a fallen tree trunk, either that or chasing pixies.

Yes, we could have waited for the stragglers but we had seen which direction to take, so with the infinite wisdom of twelve long years on the planet, we followed. Or so we thought...........to be continued....