The Hype Behind Summer Camp
Summer camp has a special place in my heart. Unfortunately I never got the opportunity to go to camp as a camper. The closest I got to that feeling was going on a couple “father-son” retreats where the whole weekend is just tailored to us, but I never went to a weeklong summer camp growing up. It is something that looking back I wish I got to do, but I digress.
This summer I got the opportunity to lead again at Castaway Young Life camp for middle school and high school, which was quite the experience.
I love counseling at camps. It’s something I could see myself doing for the next couple of years while I’m still in my twenties. Castaway camp is a special kind of camp, though. It is made specifically for all kids that go, as the camp has so many different activities like a game room, gaga ball pit, volleyball court, basketball court, pickleball court, a lake with different lake amenities like tubing and banana boating.
Even though the majority of the times I’ve been to camp as a counselor, I’ve still always enjoyed myself just with the extensive amount of activities that are there. Especially this past summer, both camps I counseled at were fantastic.
High school week was very interesting as this was the third time I’ve ever counseled a high school group, and the two previous times were groups of kids I knew from church at a much smaller camp. It was never really awkward for me to ask them to do stuff with me as I was pretty acquainted with them, and there’s only two things to do at the camp where I counseled them.
While for this camp, I went in not knowing any of the kids in my cabin. The first day and a half were a little awkward as I was trying to get to know them. Then on day three we played a big game of mafia with my cabin and two other cabins, and through that I got so close with my guys and for the rest of the time we had so many inside jokes from that game that we were constantly saying and that just broke down so many walls where I truly started building a relationship with them.
I knew all of the boys that were going and had a decent relationship with the boys in my cabin, and I actually got really close with three other kids who were in a different cabin. All throughout free time every day, I just happened to constantly run into them and we would just do something together. On the second and third day, I actually went sailboating, which is one of the amenities camp has on the lake, with the three kids and it was genuinely one of my favorite memories from camp. We were out on the lake each day for almost two hours just sailing around and talking about life and other random stuff.
One of my favorite memories from camp this summer though was the first day of middle school camp where my cabin went tubing. The tube at camp can hold three people so we rotated through until it got to my turn with two other kids. We go for one lap around until someone falls off, and as he’s climbing back onto the tube, he climbs over my back and he gets the craziest idea. He wanted to ride on my back holding onto my life jacket, instead of holding onto the handles. We got approval from the boat driver, and it was such a fun time. Afterwards the boat driver said in all of her years of leading cabins and driving the boat, she’s never once seen anyone do what we did.
I made a lot of memories this summer from camp and I’m excited for next summer to do it all again.
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