In non-camp news, my mom came to visit a couple of weekends ago and we got a bunch of wedding stuff done! Yay! Less than 2 months!! :-D
As far as camp goes, week 6 of camp I had a program called Wilderness Night Owls. It was a combination of the usual high adventure activities done in Wilderness Adventures and a camp that was offered years ago and has been brought back, in which you stay up progressively later throughout the week and don't have to wake up each day until noon. I found that I LOVED this sleep schedule! I've found that the 11pm bed time and 7am wakeup call has been hard to re-adapt to!
One of the days, a guest speaker came and brought snakes that we got to hold. So cool! We had great food, fun cookouts, and an exciting night time scavenger hunt.
My favorite part of that week was our night kayaking trip. The view of the river with stars, the moon, and some light fog on the hills was just breathtaking! We also heard an owl right by the river. It was pretty cold, but we stopped and made a fire during our dinner break and still had a great time!
I can't go into details, but the downside to the week was an emergency situation at the rock climbing and rappelling area we go to. It all still seems surreal. We had a very unique situation and (just like we've always planned), I was the one that ran to get help. The area is pretty remote and we had no cell phone service. I don't think I've ever run so fast in my life. Especially on hilly trails. The person involved ended up being ok, but we didn't get back to camp until about 4am and it was pretty traumatizing for everyone. On the bright side, we had a buffet of delicious leftovers and an amazing communion at 4:30 am.
Other than our emergency situation, it was a pretty good week with an amazing group of people!
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Week 7, I had high expectations. It was a camp called "Explore God's World": we had trips and high adventure stuff every day. A couple of the campers were very adventurous, as expected. A group of them, though, came from inner city Columbus and didn't want to do all the activities or were really hesitant (except for a couple of them). One camper caused a lot of trouble through the week: being downright disrespectful, refusing to listen, lying to get her way, making a couple of the campers she came with very angry to the point of being switched to a different group. This situation made for a difficult week. However, we still had some amazing moments.
The first full day, we did high ropes. Only a couple of campers sat out and the ones that did do the challenge course had a blast!
On Tuesday, we went to Sell's Park in Athens (the one park I hadn't explored much-go figure) to do some mountain biking. We were told it was a beginner trail: it was more like an intermediate trail. Though the ride was difficult, we had a great time!
On Wednesday, we did an 'extreme creek stomp' at a nearby 'metropark'. I put metropark in quotations because there is no big city near the Hocking Hills area, so I find it funny to refer to something as a metropark. We found some cool critters, mainly crawdads, and got to swim through a deeper part of the creek.
On Thursday, we went rock climbing and rappelling. Everyone had a great time!
On the last day, we went kayaking on the Hocking River. The campers did a lot better than I thought they would! They kept up quite well and we all had a blast! The downside was that since it was a Friday, the river was really busy.
Week 7 was definitely one of the more difficult weeks I've had this summer. But if I helped make a difference in the lives of any of those campers, it was all worth it.
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