Unbelievable as it may seem, the weekend of my stag do had arrived. The simple plan was to go camping with the lads and see what would happen when the stags were mixed with large quantities of beer (or cider in some cases). So knowing that we, as men preferred to set fire to things in addition to drinking beer (or cider) we opted our old favourite campsite in Lymington at Hurst View as they allow campfires. So after arriving we setup camp and awaited the arrival of James (and his re-appropriated army tent) which we requested just in case the weather turned on us. Still it was quite amusing to set up (under the guidance of Major Brass) and the helper beers certainly aided our progress. 😉
Once the tent was complete we awaited the arrival of the rest of the stags before preparing ourselves for the visit to the The Chequers Inn pub. Lucky for us the trip was a short one to the pub, ( as opposed to last year) as we took the correct short cut to the pub. 🙂 Once there we sat in the beer garden and enjoyed the last of the sunshine before getting some food (and more beer) in us (it was going to be a long night). As night approached it started getting a little chilly so we headed in the pubs marquee for some desert (more beer) and some shorts (Jägermeister – thanks Ed!) which appeared to go down reasonably well at time (yes, you’ll find out that isn’t entirely true later on). When closing time was apon us we migrated back to the campsite to start a fire so we could continue to party on through the night.
I don’t know what it is about stag do’s but for the majority that I’ve been on, everyone seems to party hard on the first night and be slightly worse for where the next day. This happened to be true for my own and unfortunately enough for me I didn’t feel too wonderful the next day.
Some how (as if my a miracle) with the aid of egg and bacon muffs + tea, I managed to make a miraculous recovery and enable us to complete the day mission of our weekend….. Geocaching. Now, this is something which I’ve known about for a long while but not actually taken part in. The plan is really simple, given some clues which enable you to work out a GPS co-ordinate, you have to go from location to location until you have enough clues to complete the final clue and locate the cache. Craig did a good job of choosing a relatively easy cache hunt, so armed with the initial clues we set off. After some wandering around Lymington (and getting stuck on one clue) we ended up (thankfully) in Hurst Castle and found the cache! yay. With the cobwebs blown away by our long 5 mile walk we headed off to the pub The Gun at Keyhaven for some much needed beverages. We stayed there for a long while before heading back to get sorted out back at base camp before heading onwards again back to Chequers (with some additional stags) for food (and beer). It was there that we were given some interesting T-Shirts (courtesy of Alex & Ed) to complete the weekend.
Seeing as we’d expended quite a bit of beer energy the previous night we lacked the effort to completely large it up so headed back to the campsite to set fire to things (yet again). That night was interesting, as we were plagued by a very annoying Australian chat who insisted in discussing having me tied naked somewhere in Lymington. Lucky for him he didn’t try to initiate the suggested plan and eventually we all managed (well it took a while with other people inviting themselves to our roaring fire and insisting on using petrol to make the fire larger!) to get a good nights kip (well as much as you can sleeping in a tent surrounded by snoring people!) 😉 The next day was Ed’s birthday (Happy Birthday Mate) so a few of us when for a pub lunch before heading back home for a much needed afternoons rest! Still I guess I was lucky to get off with a mild stag do as it could have been a lot more messy……….