So the end of camp has come and it's been an experience that I would definitely recommend doing! The scenery is similar to home just with more trees and no mountains, the weather has been great with the "cold" days being average summer weather temperatures for Cumbria!
Working and living with the kids has been fantastic but also tiring, getting them up for breakfast at 8.30am and not managing to get them to bed till 11pm everyday. We had 14 girls in the 1st 4 weeks and 15 in the second, aged 11-12, all with very different personalities from the quite and kind of shy to the in your face, centre of attention type, but all of them very funny with their ways.
I was the Archery Director and have had great fun, I made a difference to the range improving safety, and felt great seeing the progress the girls were making, with over 30 of them getting into the gold club (10 or more golds over the summer) with one of the girls getting 201 golds and my assistant instructor beat her 502 golds she got last summer by getting 650 this summer! Although I improved a lot at it this summer, I'm still not up to the amazing standard that she is!
There's loads of other stuff apart from normal activities, there were rainy day activities which involved a male staff member being taken into each cabin to have a makeover for the Male Staff Beauty Pageant! UN Day and Kahuna day were similar but different, the while camp is spilt into 4 teams and assigned colours and there's different activities to compete in that they sign up for, they learn loads of different chants etc and the winning team at the end of the day all goes to Cathys. For Kahuna day our teams colours were white and green and one of our chants was "Green and white we'll put up a fight, whiye and green we'll kick you in the spleen" for some reason that one stuck with me!
The 4 th of July was organised by the oldest girls on camp (15 years old) in the morning before breakfast we had a water skiing performance, loads of stuff in the day and for the evening meal they come up with a theme and the whole room is decorated with that theme, it was amazing!
Everyone on site (apart from a couple) are assigned to a team either Tan or White, if you have family at the Camp you are always assigned to the same team as the rest of your family. I was placed on the Tan Team. At lunch they will announce that it is a game that night and the whole mess hall erupts with the noise of people screaming Tan or White, standing on chairs arms everywhere, the team's doing their chants, it was something else! The kids full on commit to the games and the first capture the flag we played there was a broken arm, 2 dislocated shoulders and many more injuries!
For the last 10 days there has been family camp, where younger children potentially coming camp come along for a week with their parents see what it's like experience the activities, we had s'mores every night with something extra added each time which was tasty!
On days off we've been walking, go-karting, watching films, going into Minocqua and Eagle River, which are the local towns, and heading to bars in the evenings.
I have made some fantastic friends this summer, some who live far away and others who are 20 minutes away when I get home. Luckily I get to see a couple of them again in my travels! Thank you Chippewa for an amazing experience!
