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I went to, of all things, a horseback riding camp in the hills of southern Iowa. It was a lot of fun, although I ended up working in the barn a lot because I was raised to volunteer for that kind of stuff. I occasionally miss riding, out, camping, and riding back in the next day, but horses are expensive and a ton of work to keep. Of course, come to find out a few years later, the guy who owned and ran the place got arrested for molesting a 15 year old kid. That kind of tainted the memory for a lot of people. The state bought it out when his wife divorced him and sold the place to get away, and it's a camp for underprivileged kids these days, so at least that worked out.
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May 4, 2015 11:42
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I went to boy scout camp a few times and it was a blast. The activities were typical and mundane though I did enjoy canoeing a lot. The most fun about it was getting into mischief with the other kids. Pranks, jokes, sports, competitions, first porn mag, it was basically heaven for a ~12 year old. The scout leaders were control freaks, though now that I have a 7 year old kid they do seem pretty wild in packs. One troop stole their scout leader's license plates and threw them in the latrine. The state police came and had them shovel to find them. Last thing the cop said was "five more minutes digging then you have to start using your hands". Fortunately they found them shortly thereafter. Philmont was too expensive for any of us to consider, but one kid sold a ton of Tom-Wat one year and they gave him a free trip. I also went to day camp in Salem that I had mixed feelings about. It was fun but some of the kids were mean to me because I wasn't from there.
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May 4, 2015 20:41
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Oh yeah, day camp was awful. My mom sent me to the poor kid one we could afford for a few summers when I was really little so she could work and I was always miserable. I remember one summer being sent home almost every day for lice. My mom was so frustrated because she treated it every time and didn't understand why it kept coming back, and then I alerted her that they were checking with their fingers instead of a pencil- surprisingly, no issues after that. I got to go to the "rich kid" YMCA summer day camp one summer (I guess my mom came into some money) and that one was pretty awesome. I remember the counselors being a lot more engaged.
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May 4, 2015 20:59
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I went to a summer camp for a few years that was in the foothills of the peninsula in the SF bay area. We'd get bussed in everyday on a 30 minute ride and sing shitloads of camp songs both ways. I never liked the first one of the day, "I'm alive, awake, alert, enthusiastic, NOT!" I dunno, maybe it was too early. We'd also sing Froggy went a Courtin' and add a verse everyday so that we'd hit 10 verses at the end of the camp (camp was 2 weeks, M-F). We did lots of hiking, arts and crafts, and games/activities. I didn't care too much for arts and crafts, like no dude I'm not excited to make pasta art or whatever the gently caress, though the lanyards we made were pretty cool. The hikes were fun, though you're in a line with 50 other kids so it's not like a magical experience. There was a 7 mile hike that we did and as you can imagine not many kids wanted to do that. I think they had the option of doing the hike or doing something else. Funnest part though was the games. Lots of games of tag, steal the bacon, prison dodge ball, capture the flag, hide and go seek, rounders, espionage, and the counselor's favorite game, crossover. That one had the counselors line up on opposite sides of a field and would throw the foam balls at the kids whenever they told them to run to the other side. Kid getting on your nerves? Now's your chance for some payback. There was a sleepover thing that they did on the second Thursday where we'd all camp out and stay up late listening to whatever camp stories they had, playing capture the flag, and then playing kick the can but using a flashlight to pick people off. A couple highlights from my time are when I broke this dude's wrist and when I legit got kicked out of camp. The wrist breaking I felt really bad for and it was a total freak accident. There was a kid who I guess was visiting from Canada or some poo poo and from what I remember he was decently good at sports. Well anyway we were playing dodgeball and I threw the ball at him and it hit him square on his hand and he looked like he was in pain for a while. Didn't think too much of it until he came back the next day with a cast on his wrist. I felt super lovely about it, but he was a good sport about it and they never knew who threw the ball. If you're out there somewhere, sorry man. Sort of ruined your summer that year. Other highlight was us playing a game called graveyard. You had to remain as still as possible and the last person to not move won. This led to other kids putting sticks and poo poo in your ear trying to get you to move so you'd lose. Anyway this one kid was out and trying to get other people out so he comes up to me and starts pointing his finger towards my eye. I'm fine with this until he touches my eyelashes and keeps getting closer, then I flip poo poo and punch him a couple times. They suspended me from camp for the last few days and that was kinda my last time there. Sucks to leave on a sour note, considering how much fun I'd had the last few years. Overall it was tons of fun and was a great way to spend summer, unless my dad had a crazy idea to drive to the Yukon or something. That was fun too.
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May 5, 2015 03:14
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I went to a summer camp in Canada when I was about 14. There was a program to learn English and one to learn how to use photoshop/flash and make websites, I went to that one, although most people went for the English one. The program was pretty basic but I really enjoyed it and learned enough to run with it on my own. Afterwards I became a digital artist so this might have been one of the reasons. There were people from many countries, especially from Latin America and Asia. I made some friends who I kept in touch with for a few years but I later lost contact with all of them even though I still have some of them on facebook. Most of the counselors were cool people who seemed to enjoy being there genuinely and most activities were pretty fun. Some anecdotes I remember: -The Frozen Throne came out while I was in there, I remember playing it whenever I had free time. We also had quake 3(?) LAN matches. -I convinced a chinese guy that "whore" was "manzana" in Spanish (apple). He went around yelling "eres una manzana" (you are an apple) at everybody. -Some guy put an instant soup in the microwave but he forgot to add water so it started a small fire. The whole building got evacuated but nothing really happened. -For some reason I had a plastic bottle of chocolate milk in my room but I left it in there for several days so it congealed into a nasty substance. I went to dump it on the grass but I got caught by one of the counselors who then proceeded to berate me for pouring it there and not in the dumpster. This guy also had a lazy eye, which made it really uncomfortable because I felt as if he was looking at somebody else. -We put soy sauce and tabasco on my counselor's tea as a prank. He was a pretty good sport about it.
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May 5, 2015 16:49
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The running joke is that when you're Jewish in the NY/NJ metro area, you get sent to camp. Woody Allen put it best: "I was sent to interfaith summer camps, where I was savagely beaten by children of all races and creeds." I went to Camp Emerson in the Berkshire hills in Massachusetts for 8 weeks each summer from I think 1990-1994, IIRC. I was 8-12. It was co-ed. Boys were in four age groups, from youngest to oldest - Rangers, Woodsmen, Pioneers, Explorers. Girls were Daisies, Belmonts, something else (I think Laurels, from what I can google) and Hillcrests. It was a nonreligious camp - no religious activities whatsoever, although there was a synagogue van on Friday nights and a church van on Sunday mornings for those kids and staff so inclined. The days were I think four periods long. You would wake up, clean your bunk area, then do your chore for the day - they organized work wheels and stuff like that so one kid was responsible for sweeping, one for mopping, one for the porch, etc. Each cabin was given a score for cleanliness and the highest scoring cabin for the week usually got ice cream sundaes or soda from the fountain as a reward. Each week, usually Sunday mornings, there was Super Clean-Up, where each bunk had a different task to do together. Sometimes it was to clean your age group's bathroom (shared bathrooms - Woodsmen and Pioneers generally had really lovely bathrooms), picking up litter on your side's sports fields, cleaning the dining hall, etc. You got to pick either three or four "special interests" - courses, basically. Different kinds of arts and crafts, all the major sports (even golf, there was a small driving-range style net), water sports (including water skiing and windsurfing, but you had to take a special swimming test since these were off-camp at a nearby big deep lake), and (to me) cool stuff like photography, computers, newspaper, and radio - they had a small AM station that had a very limited range. One period was a bunk activity where each age group would gather up in their bunks and go do tennis, or boating, etc. I usually brought a book to the sports stuff or tried to fake like I didn't have socks to wear with my sneakers (which was required) or otherwise, and some counselors would try, but I was really quite happy reading a book in the shade when we were playing sports. Up until you were an Explorer or Hillcrest, one period a day was a required swimming course. They had a pool for lessons but some days you got to go to the smaller lake by the pool to take out a canoe, kayak, or paddle boat. There was a snack between period 3 and 4, and a rest period after lunch and mail call. The snack was usually ice pops, or some kind of ice cream novelty. Evenings would have a free-choice activity period after dinner where they'd post what was available to do that night. Some evenings they'd take a van to that waterskiing lake and you could go fishing. After that, they had an all-camp activity. The theater special interests would rehearse for and put on plays, there would be small concerts, or roller skating, or "dances" as much as kids of that age group in the 90s would do. Sometimes the older groups would have separate activities, or maybe it'd be movie night and they'd take us all to a theater. My favorite was Gold Rush - they'd get a few hundred bucks worth of pennies, nickels, and dimes, and scatter them across the soccer field, then unleash the entire camp onto the field. You collected what you could and brought them back to your age group's base, and whoever ended up collecting the most would win ice cream sundaes or something. Thursdays were Trip Day - a water park, or an amusement park, or a trip to a historical site, or something like that. The second four-week period would have College Days for about a week. Sprung on us as a surprise - we never knew when it would happen - the counselors would interrupt some big all-camp activity, or a plane would drop flyers, and they'd divide the entire camp into four colleges named after big universities. There were sports competitions, or arts/crafts competitions, talent shows, etc. All that whole competitive spirit thing. I read a lot of books or got away with being all spiritous, or hung out in the arts and crafts hall. There were yearbooks, an end-of-camp dance, tearful goodbyes, and such. These days predate the major use of the internet so a lot of addresses were exchanged in yearbooks. I remember being teased pretty badly by many of the other kids, but that's probably because I wasn't exactly the most social child. It wasn't too traumatizing. You started off missing home a bit but there was always at least something fun to do. Some interesting stuff. I think back then the craziest amount of hook-ups were when you somehow kissed a girl or were seen holding hands. More fun was had with bunkmates and friends - at one point one kid was operating a trading post out of his bunk window, basically setting up a marketplace for people to trade gum, comics, etc. for other people's stuff. I scored a squirt gun for a pack of Extra Winterfresh - that was THE poo poo back then at camp, IIRC. Thinking back on it, I formed a lot of lifelong interests. I'm gonna go dig up my yearbooks tonight and give them a look through. I worked for one summer at a camp, thinking I'd have a good time and make some money. What a mistake that was. I was hired to run the radio program only to be told I was just going to be a normal bunk counselor. Hated every second.
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May 13, 2015 21:45
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Liquid Communism posted:I went to, of all things, a horseback riding camp in the hills of southern Iowa. It was a lot of fun, although I ended up working in the barn a lot because I was raised to volunteer for that kind of stuff. I occasionally miss riding, out, camping, and riding back in the next day, but horses are expensive and a ton of work to keep. Oh hey, another victim of Bortell's Ranch! The scary part was that one night I had to stay in the Bortell's house because my bunkmate was being a total weird creep and kept trying to talk to me in my sleep. Luckily, Bortell never came into the room I was staying in? Here's the latest mugshot of the creep/owner from the Florida Sex Offender's registry! http://offender.fdle.state.fl.us/offender/flyer.do?personNbr=42665
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May 14, 2015 04:20
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I went to marine biology camp with a member of Imagine Dragons. This was back before he was in a band, though, so he was just another geeky kid. We spent most of our time petting sea slugs, cutting fish open, and generally doing a bunch of fun fish stuff. The idea of communal showers was gay to our 90s kid minds, so a lot of us just didn't shower. 5/5
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May 15, 2015 11:22
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I went to day camp every year for seven years and the saddest day was the last day of the last year I could go. It was a Christian camp and mostly I remember rowing canoes and swimming, catching frogs, snakes, and newts, eating lunch in a treehouse, swinging on a big swing that took us out over a fifty foot drop, singing songs, and playing in the barn with the animals. It was a lot of fun and every kid should go  it was a day camp so we went home at night.I also went to a horse camp that happened year round. I actually only went there once during the summer since I usually went on the weekends during the school year. It was pretty much the same except less loving around and more horses and also I spent the night. My parents church was part-owner of another summer camp but my main involvement with that was in the spring when we went over to get it ready for summer and in the fall when we helped get it ready for winter. That was a lot fun but for me highly unstructured, the kids all hosed off to tease the bears and climb trees and rocks while the adults worked. I only went to the actual camp once but it wasn't as fun as the work party imo Also my school system had something called "outdoor school" which was basically summer camp in the spring in the Pacific Northwest so if you're picturing lots of rain surrounded constantly by your classmates at all times for five days you've pictured it correctly. Summer camp is a lot of fun and every kid should go at least once.
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May 19, 2015 03:53
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Is there an exact accounting anywhere of non-Jewish people who were caught up in the Holocaust? Like, what were the next biggest groups? Roma? Gays? Russian POWs? Edit: yep, totally meant to post this in the Summer Camp thread. What are your opinions, campers?
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May 19, 2015 17:18
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Is there an exact accounting anywhere of non-Jewish people who were caught up in the Holocaust? Like, what were the next biggest groups? Roma? Gays? Russian POWs? I'd imagine Russian POWs.
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May 19, 2015 17:33
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Is there an exact accounting anywhere of non-Jewish people who were caught up in the Holocaust? Like, what were the next biggest groups? Roma? Gays? Russian POWs? I haven't been to one of those camps, but it's my understanding that they were not very nice and you shouldn't go.
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May 19, 2015 21:38
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The communal showers apparently leave much to be desired.
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May 19, 2015 21:46
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How often to kids get sad, give up and go home? At the place I may work this summer, they said it only happens once a year.
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May 19, 2015 22:32
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Mortley posted:How often to kids get sad, give up and go home? At the place I may work this summer, they said it only happens once a year. I only saw it happen once when I was a camper. The girl was 14 and had never been away from her mom for a single night, and for some reason a two week sleepaway camp seemed like a good idea. Everyone tried to cheer her up and was super nice to her, and the camp even broke the Don't Phone Parents Unless Emergency rule to try and help her, but she was just miserable and went home after three days. The other kids would generally be sad once in a while if they missed their parents but would generally move on.
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May 19, 2015 23:41
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I went to a nerd camp 6th-10th grade, and my first year there I went home a night early, before the end of camp dance. Earlier that day we had a showcase of what we'd done in the various classes over the two weeks for all the parents, and so seeing my parents then just made me want to go home.
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May 20, 2015 05:11
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drat, now I miss riding.
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May 23, 2015 06:23
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Zaftig posted:I only saw it happen once when I was a camper. The girl was 14 and had never been away from her mom for a single night, and for some reason a two week sleepaway camp seemed like a good idea. Everyone tried to cheer her up and was super nice to her, and the camp even broke the Don't Phone Parents Unless Emergency rule to try and help her, but she was just miserable and went home after three days. At the camp I worked at that was a known kiss of death. Once they call home they will go home. Hearing mom's voice just magnifies the need. Homesick mitigation was a big deal, mostly because it's a sucky way to lose kids. I guess I should storytime a bit? The camp I worked at was a wildlife sanctuary with a big emphasis on nature education. Our director had been doing it forever. Like, worked with my Dad when my Dad was 18 and worked there, which I think made a huge difference. Can't beat experience. We were structured so that it was two weeks, first week mornings kids were split into groups of 6-8 for educational workshops based on topics ('Spiders' or 'Trees' or whatever), with free time, nap time, and then afternoon adventures. For those we gave the kids options and let them pick, closing activities if they filled up. We tried to run a selection of like, calm artsy stuff (go to the pond and watercolor!) adventure stuff (hike out to ~cool landmark~) and continued/advanced nerdy poo poo (~fossil hunting~). For the second week they'd keep the same afternoon format, but do some kind of project in the mornings. We let them pick their own (with some guidance, of course) and they'd get staff to help them. We had a great staff/camper ratio, something like 3->5, so we could rotate out and rest. We had the kids who didn't shower, copperhead snake bites at 11 pm that didn't get caught until 2 am. I made the 'no, get out here and let me look at that,' and the 'no, this is not normal, we're going to go over your evening and figure this out' calls, pretty proud of that since I'm pretty sure I saved this kids foot. We had a few bear encounters, crazy rednecks, kids forgetting water bottles (that one was on us, it's our job to make sure they're prepared), bee attacks, sudden cow herds, big storms, etc. Once a snake was slidding up a tree in front of the main lodge and we called the whole camp over to check it out. It proptly went up and ate a nestful of baby birds as mommy and daddy bird desprately tried to peel it off the tree. Nature Camp! We had a page in the staff handbook devoted to places the staff could go to gently caress and condoms in the staff room first aid kit, though our director was hard rear end about no drugs or alcohol and we all respected that. Things got weird, especially for the staff that where there for the whole summer. You'd be on best behavior for the kids and then get a two day break to decompress/prep for the next session. We went very anti-electronics around the kids but as soon as the last car left we'd be pumping "gently caress the Pain Away" or "Nigga's in Paris" out of the stereos we kept hidden away. Wet Hot American summer is... the most accurate summer camp movie ever made, even though each moment is patently ridicoulous. I think the worst experiences there we had was when we got a kid from the year before who came back all skeletal.  We assigned one staff to sit next to her at meal times to make sure she ate and monitored her afterwards so that she didn't go straight to the bathrooms to puke. That's hard.
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May 23, 2015 18:02
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:One of the things I occasionally regret never doing was going to some cool summer camp as a kid. Basically I didn't give a gently caress at the time because I was a nerd and also a pussy about not wanting to be away from home. My only experience about those camps comes from TV shows and movies. You know the ones, with the cool camp activities by the lake, rad counselors, comfy cabins, staying up late watching scary movies, and coming back every year to see all your summer friends again. Or in Law and Order SVU where they are all rape centers. So what as summer camp like for you? Was it a fun filled adventure that gave you memories to last a lifetime or was it overpriced garbage that drove your family into the poor house? I should preface this by saying I was bullied quite a lot as a kid. Like, from preschool onwards. I just didn't really know how to fight back or stand up for myself or anything. Summer camp wasn't an overnight affair, we would get bussed in in the morning and then taking home in the evening. Most of my distinct memories of summer camp wind up with me getting bullied again, every once in a while by the same kid who would do it at school. Also looking back, I'm mildly sure that one or two events were people just kidding around or accidents and I simply couldn't tell the difference. Anyway, the one time I managed to protest enough that my mom didn't sign me up in time so I would be staying home that summer, she told me the next day that I fell asleep with a smile on my face. gently caress summer camp.
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May 25, 2015 04:27
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I went to this weird summer camp where you did stuff during the day, but went home at night. Where we lived outside of Vancouver it was the burbs, but it was only five minutes to get to deep forest. So I'd get packed off in the morning, five minutes away to the camp, and then bundled back home at 5pm. They only had one overnight stay on the last day of the camp. Overall it wasn't great, and wasn't terrible, it was just so completely mediocre. The counselors weren't even the type that were too busy loving around with each other, they just sat around smoking and reading magazines, and occasionally going "Uhhhh.... okay, now go swimming." Other than that we mainly just hung around and bullshitted like we did at school.
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May 25, 2015 10:30
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I've been to a few different summer camps (age ranging from about 4th grade to 10th grade) and the main thing that stood out to me is that the experience is more enjoyable the older you are. The first time was pretty bad. It was my first time away from home, I didn't know anybody there and didn't make any friends, I got dehydrated, got heat stroke, camp counselors/administrators wouldn't let me call home. I pretty much cried and waited to go home the whole time. It sucked. The next two times I went to a different, less scouts/wilderness-oriented camp. MUCH better. This one had the standard outdoor activities, but also shade and the occasional air-conditioned building. It was a church-based camp so I spent a lot of time waiting patiently for singing time to be over, but in the meantime I went NUTS with junk food, soda, and candy. Your mileage may vary depending on the strictness of your parents, but this was the first time I was exposed to unlimited free soda (cafeteria-style dining w/ fountain drinks like at a restaurant.) The final two summer camp were awesome. One was an art camp, and one was a space and aeronautics camp. Camps geared towards younger kids get shown a lot more in popular culture for whatever reason, but going to camp as a mid-to-late teenager rules. The activities and people involved are a lot more interesting, and you actually get something out of the experience other than a sunburn. At that age you are given a lot more agency with your allotted free time, which we had about 3 hours of per day, depending on other scheduled activities. Lots of self-guided fun, beautiful hiking, field trips to local towns, and general messing around with friends. At no point was my camp experience ever like in the movies. It was either much better, or much worse. Even the most modern depictions of summer camps tend to skew at least -25 years with their visual/social aesthetic, presumably based on the nostalgia of the directors and writers.
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May 26, 2015 20:52
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Camp in the movies is always cabins and horrible cliques and counselors who don't give a gently caress, and that was so not my experience. I went to a Girl Scout camp (no stinky boys with cooties allowed!) pretty much every summer from the time I was 7 or 8 until I was 19. My parents could barely afford it so I sold cookies to try to get scholarship money from the troop and somehow we scraped enough together for my sister and I to go. I loved it. There weren't a lot of other kids in my school who went to the camp and I was bullied at school but at camp I made some of my best friends. I thrived on the schedule - 7:30 wakeups, camp songs, communal dishwashing after breakfasts. Rotating chore charts by campsite - there were four campsites and each one had to clean the latrines at least once during the week. Days filled with swimming, boating, crafts and teambuilding. Getting older and having travel sessions. I once did a two-week CIT session that consisted of packing 22 people and all their camping stuff into a 21-person van and driving around Pennsylvania to a different campsite each night. We saw the temporary Flight 93 Memorial at Shanksville and signed a wall there. We visited Hershey Park, got horribly sunburned and screamed camp songs on roller coasters. It was loving amazing. At our camp we had platform tents, the heavy canvas kind on a raised wooden base. There was an ancient barn we used for the drama center until the council decided it was too dangerous; we always thought it was haunted anyway and continued to do night hikes out there to tell ghost stories about the former owner who had died there and been eaten by rats. There was a little stable and everyone got a day to take a trail ride, except the horse camp girls who got to ride every day. We swam in a lake and hiked in the woods and the older girls went on "Prim", aka Primitive Camping, where we hiked out to the wildest part of the massive camp acreage and spent 3 or 4 nights crammed into pop-up tents, doing day hikes and teambuilding, not showering and having mud fights, and occasionally running out of water and peeing on campfires to put them out. Our "sister camp", which was just the council's next-nearest camp, had cabins and a massive horse barn and a scummy tiny pond, so they had to swim in their pool instead. It was awful going there, all their rituals were different! Counselors were definitely loving around; I know when I became a counselor we went from our side of camp (2 week residence camp) to the other side (Day camp cabins) and spent an entire night up there playing drinking games and sharing dirty stories. I never had sex at camp, though. Because it was a Girl Scout camp there were very few male counselors, all of whom had been carefully vetted to be allowed to spend entire summers around teenage girls so most of them were very, very careful with their relationships. We got a male exchange counselor one year though and I'm pretty sure he was banging one of the female exchange counselors. Also, yes, it's loving creepy how many of the older campers would develop insane crushes on the male counselors. I had a crush on pretty much every guy who worked there when I was a camper, and then when I got to be a counselor it was a revelation looking at my teenage charges trying to flirt with a coworker and going "oh my god, I was like that?!". We also had the yearly camper masturbator except in our case it was more likely a case of sexual abuse at home, which kind of puts a damper on the funny aspect of the story. Faerunner fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Jun 6, 2015 |
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Jun 3, 2015 04:41
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I was sent into the Carolinas. Pretty cool camp, smoked my first cig, heard my first Black Flag song on a cassette tape in the woods. Learned I was bizarrely gifted with anything involving ballistics. Arrows, bullets, whatever. I didn't even like guns and still don't. Played lacrosse for the first time and sucked at it. There was a stream where we would catch crawfish, once I caught the king of all crawdads, this thing was like 5 inches long and bright red. We had awkward dances with the girls' camp from down the road. Most of our counselors were UK guys on some sort of exchange program, and in retrospect they were loving awesome. They took every chance to sneak off and get hammered, but were really good sports about being stranded in the wilderness with a bunch of kids making fun of their accents. Every now and then, they'd try to get a cricket game going and we would just gently caress it all up. Best memory was a bunch of the kids going on a random hike up into the hills with a couple counselors, ostensibly to find some abandoned mine or farmstead. We actually found the thing. It was by accident. We sat down to rest and realized we were sitting on some very worn down but clearly manmade stone walls, so old that we had to claw the dirt away to see what they were. That was really cool. I hated it at the time though, because there weren't any video games. There should be summer camp for grownups. 
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Jun 4, 2015 15:58
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Summer camp for adults? Yeah, that's a thing now. Looks fun, because you can have lots of alcohol and no one will call your parents if you have sex (I assume).
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Jun 5, 2015 21:37
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I did the triple crown (Bisset in Manitoba, Key West in Florida, Philmont in New Mexico), and I also ran the shotgun range for the national jamboree and was n.y.l.t. staff when I was a teenager (boy scout stuff). I was brought up outdoors. I got to scuba dive, ride in a seaplane, climb a mountain(s), canoe through Canada, shoot shotguns, and probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting. If you have kids it's worth it to go out at least once a year and do something.
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Jun 6, 2015 11:18
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I went to a church camp for many years as a child. My camp was in northern Indiana on a lake, and lasted for one week. As I remember it went like this. Breakfast in the morning was started by a bell ringing, morning worship , daily activity, free time ,dinner , vespers (evening prayer) then group games. This place had paddle boats and a water slide. Once you were in 6th grade or something like that you got a dance on Fri night. I don't remember much else except it was fun and I always spent a half my snack money on my "girlfriend" for the week. At the end of the week everyone got a printout showing all the campers names address and phone numbers. This was way before texting and email. I would like to send my kids but it's too expensive without the help of my grandparents church who always paid half. joebuddah fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 15:16
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joebuddah posted:I went to a church camp for many years as a child. My camp was in northern Indiana on a lake, and lasted for one week. As I remember it went like this. Breakfast in the morning was started by a bell ringing, morning worship , daily activity, free time ,dinner , vespers (evening prayer) then group games. This place had paddle boats and a water slide. Once you were in 6th grade or something like that you got a dance on Fri night. I don't remember much else except it was fun and I always spent a half my snack money on my "girlfriend" for the week. At the end of the week everyone got a printout showing all the campers names address and phone numbers. This was way before texting and email. Lots of the public camps (Girl/boy scouts, YMCA) have scholarships you can apply for and in general tend to be more affordable.
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Jun 8, 2015 17:32
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Chicken Butt posted:Summer camp for adults? Yeah, that's a thing now. Isn't that what the military is for? Seriously though the traditional Boy Scout summer camp is basically the military for middle school children. Sleep in bunks, eat in a mess hall, do communal activities according to a set schedule, line up every morning to raise the flag, do roll call and the icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 23:56
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icantfindaname posted:Isn't that what the military is for? That kind of Boy Scouts sounds terrible. Mine we just walked off into the woods, camped somewhere, and generally tried not to chop our fingers off with our knives. Go swimming, cook steaks, and maybe think real hard about one day, possibly, earning a badge, but not actually doing it. Made it three years without earning a single badge. Winning!
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Jun 9, 2015 00:31
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I remember the people who took scouting seriously were the biggest douchbags. Like the kind of person you'd run into 10 years later and still have a visceral reaction of "want to kick his teeth in...badly."
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Jun 9, 2015 01:49
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The Boy Scouts was pretty much explicitly founded as a pseudo-military to train children for service in the real military, by a career officer in the British imperial army in like 1910
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Jun 11, 2015 00:09
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