By Travis Simpson

On Saturday, November 3, 2012, I attended Scouting University, for the very first time. I attended a class on cooking, for which I am a merit badge counselor. I learned how to bake a meatloaf in a hollowed out onion, how to bake muffins in a hollowed out orange, & hoe to make bacon & eggs in a paper sack! Very cool!

I also attended classes on Crime Scene Investigation, Survival Bracelets, & Realistic First Aid. The CSI class was mostly old news for me, but I still enjoyed it, & the instructor was very good. Learning to make a survival bracelet was fun, & I will use that to teach my Wolf Den. The Realistic First Aid class was great. We learned how to make fake wounds to use for First Aid training. This will come in handy next Halloween!

There were a couple of down sides to the day, though. Registration was disorganized chaos. We were unable to get into the knot tying class, which we (my wife & I) really wanted to take. In addition, the classes we took were spread out, so there was a lot of moving back & forth. Also, there were multiple classes in the same room, which was very distracting, making hard to hear the instructors, sometimes.

All in all, we had a great time, & we plan to attend again next year.