It was like any other day when the sun was out, but when the sun went down it was like the earth froze. It was a chilling night in August when it all went down. My friend Trevor and I had everything for the night ahead except for one thing… courage. We were 10 and we didn’t know anything about living in the woods, even for one scary, terrible night. This night was when we were going out into some woods that Trevor’s dad had found a while back. We were going into the woods without any adults because Trevor’s father had checked it out and he said that the woods were baron, nothing lived there at all. We believed him and thought it would be an easy night out there so we made a bet that we would stay out there the whole night all by ourselves as long as we could have the day to set up a camp and a cooler for food. He said he would put $ 20 on each of us and the bet was on.

That day was hot, on the way there; the air conditioner wouldn’t work so we had to roll the windows to the dark blue F150 down. We were talking as if we had already won the 20 dollars. We had it in the bag, or so we thought. There was a 7-11 so we had to stop for some gas and to stock up on some food for the day and night ahead (we just wanted more food even though we packed about 10 pounds already).The 7-11 would be the last time for a day that we would feel the amazing cool air of modern times. It was 9:00 A.M. and it was already 90 burning degrees outside. Trevor’s dad tried to let us out at a place that would be a good spot for us to set up a camp and for him to meet us again the next day. After 4 hours of terrible car ride that felt like 20 hours, we got to an incredible spot.

We were left off at a cliff that was about 20 feet above a crystal clear lake that had a decent sized waterfall flowing down from the cliff. The view was beautiful, we had so much time to set up and even walk around and find some wood and rocks to make a fire. We considered jumping into the lake but we decided that since we could see the bottom and it only looked like 6 feet, that is was only 6 feet deep. We walked around and looked for dried out sticks and logs while we walked around to the lake. We were weighed down by what felt like 200 pounds in the desert 95 degree heat now. We finally got to the site and we put our stuff down and immediately jumped into the refreshing crystal water. I swallowed some of the water and felt its cool against my hot body, then thought that I was contaminating a bottled water company’s water. I kept swimming and having a good time though. When we got out of the water we had some cold pizza that we got from the 7-11 that we stopped at, it wasn’t really cold but more of a warm cold since it was piping hot with steam coming out of the box when we got it but we put it in the cooler. The pizza sauce was flowing off the pizza and onto our clothes into the water which our feet were dangling with our toes like little fishing baits in the water. We decided to get to work on the tents, we got all the stuff out and we then said it was too complicated and we moved on to the fire. Some rocks were on the bottom of part of the lake so we dove down into the water and got them to create a wall so the fire couldn’t get out. We then got some of the sticks we had picked up earlier and found that they were so brittle that if we dropped them from 2 inches above the ground that they would break. It was now about 2:00 and we had a new mission, finding not dry sticks on the ground. We got a few and made what looked like would be a good fire making technique. We rubbed sticks together for 30 minutes then we got our first tiny spark. The brittle dry sticks came in handy there. Our tiny spark had grown into a massive college party fire within 30 seconds. At that time we decided to break out the jet puffed marshmallows, Kraft graham crackers and delicious Ghirardelli chocolates. We burned around 10 marshmallows trying to get just the right golden brown crispiness on the outside but the warm sticky gooey-ness on the inside. The graham crackers were really dry so we broke out the drinks. Dr. Pepper and s’mores filled our bellies with sugar and caffeine within the hour. We took a little nap and then woke back up at 5:00.

(Teaser ends here- expansion that made a middle school paper longer and better)

The next day we went back to the top of the cliff and Trevor’s father asked us how it was. We said terrible and we put our stuff in the car and then put ourselves in the car. He asked with a grin on his face what went wrong and we said nothing. The rest of the ride home was silent and had no speech, no radio, only the sound of the bumps in the road and our stuff in the bed sliding around.