Girls Camp

I am going to preface this post with the statement, I’m sure my camp experience could have been much worse. With that said, let’s dive in. Monday morning we met in the church parking lot to pack up our cars and head up to camp. I of course was the first leader there (along with 10 of the girls) so we were left waiting quite awhile for the other leaders to show up. Once they finally got there, we had the girls eat the lunches they brought and started off with a devotional from our youth camp leaders. Now when our ward went to girls camp, we tended to pack the night before (smart) and leave really early (not so smart). Because it was so early, we usually said a prayer and were off. It took a bit of time to get the trucks loaded and then we spent 20 minutes on the devotional.

When we left the church, it was a beautiful sunny 70 degree day. I got some of the older girls in my car so we listened to some sweet tunes on our way up and sang at the top of our lungs. The camp we were going to was about an hour and a half away past Hyrum near Porcupine Dam. The unfortunate part of the trip was how after Hyrum, we had a once dirt road now mud puddle due to the continuous rain fall we’d received over the last week. Rex handled it like a champ (for those of you that don’t know – that’s the name of our Forester) but some of the other leaders could have used a course on mud road driving. Winter wasn’t that long ago – mud is a lot like snow, I didn’t see the issue.

Because of the mud it took us about 45 minutes longer to get up there than originally planned. We found our camp site, and got out of the cars to stretch. Not 5 minutes after getting out of the car, it started sprinkling for about 30 seconds, then it morphed into a torrential downpour and didn’t stop for the next 3 hours. We managed to get a canopy set up for the girls to stand underneath but the genius that packed the trailer had put all the tents in the back. This meant we had to assemble a huge canopy to put all of the trailer stuff under so we could get to the tents and get them set up. For some reason the responsibility of assembling said large sans assembly instructions canopy fell on the resident engineer. Now I will admit, I love putting together furniture but I’m successful at putting together furniture because I’m excellent at following directions to a T. This is why when we were assembling our dining room chairs none of mine ended up broken and Shad’s did. We finally got it put together and started unloading the stuff.

As you can imagine, the campsite was already pretty muddy. Add a good hour of constant downpour and we were downright sinking. Setting up tents was another great challenge – at least the girls were responsible to set up their own, I was too busy trying to figure out how to put the leaders tents together (also sans instructions – tents come with instructions for a reason!!). The whole time I was thinking, I’m probably not even going to sleep in this stupid tent, I should be helping the girls but after 2 hours the leader tents were successfully up.

This is the mud on day 2 after being in the sun for 8 hours...

At this point it finally stopped raining which meant it was time to attempt a fire, with the sopping wet wood and no tinder to be found anywhere. Somehow the fire became my responsibility to, I’ve never actually lit a fire by myself before let alone a soggy gross one. 2 hours later after scrounging for anything that would burn remotely well so the wood could dry out, we had a fire.

We made our hobo dinners (I enjoyed getting the 411 on the 9th grade drama going on from the Miamaids) for the evening and sat down for FHE (It was Monday night!). FHE went well, instead of singing a hymn though, the leaders insisted on singing the song I wrote for camp (that’s another post). The girls didn’t seem to like the song (I don’t either so I could relate) so I felt so bad making them sing it every time we were supposed to be singing a song – I’m going to assume this trend continued after I left camp since I had to record the song for them to sing along with after I left. The girls went on their snipe hunt and went to bed, while the leaders insisted we all stay up and talk around the campfire. At midnight I finally convinced them I could go to bed. I put my stuff in the tent with the quiet leaders and was out. I managed to stay warm thanks to my -5 degree rated sleeping bag, the others weren’t so lucky (suckers).

The girls got up and made their breakfast burritos then it was off to certification – for the ENTIRE day. Instead of splitting the girls up into their perspective years to do just what was required of them for certification, everyone did all of the certification. It was awful. We did manage to finish early though, probably because after repeating our certification parts a 4th time we managed to make them really short. Because we finished early, the camp lady thought it would be great to do the service project we had missed the day before because of the rain. We hiked down to another camp site to pick weeds out of the field. Since we were in the wild, I wasn’t sure why they considered some plants weeds and some not. I did finally get my camera out to take pictures though. After the service project, I weighed the benefits of staying up at camp for dinner. There were none so I went home. One of the leaders started to cry when I told her I was leaving – no joke. Apparently I was very helpful while I was at camp.

Service!

I came home with a raging headache and the simple statement, “I hate girls camp.” I’m starting on my excuses for next year now…