Camp Champions Blog

"My parents aren't cool!" - Liam Baskin

When I started my career as a camp director in 1993, my mother (the "Silver Fox") shared the following thought with me: "summer camp is like college, but just a little bit early".

Being a strong believer in my mother's wisdom, I found myself thinking about this statement fairly often. Summer camp had been a huge part of my personal development as a young man, and had even found its way into my college and graduate school applications. Yet the idea that "camp was like college" did not seem to make sense to me at the time.

This is one of my most recent blogs for Psychology Today.

22 is becoming my favorite number.  It was the length of our huge family trip this last school year. We spent 8 weeks in Europe, 11 weeks in Asia and 3 weeks in New Zealand.

Susie looks like she is 22 (at least she does to me).

[I JUST REALIZED THAT WE NEVER POSTED THIS ONE.  SO HERE IT IS, 3 MONTHS LATE.]

We are back in the states.  To be clear, we are not home.  Instead, we are in a 7 hour layover in Los Angeles airport having already taken 2 flights and been up for 23 hours.  We are a perky and happy lot.

Tomorrow we fly home.  We do not know quite how to feel about it.

Part of me is delighted the end is here.  After all, we have had a LOT of togetherness.  Nerves are a bit frayed.  Each of us has discovered at least one newfound pet peeve within the family.

We are in Christchurch, the scene of the massive earthquake roughly a year ago.  Some estimate that this event created more monetary damage than any previous earthquake.

We are having some trouble processing the disaster.  To be honest, we have not personally witnessed any true disasters.  My grandmother was an infant during the Galveston flood of 1901, but I did not really understand the stories.  We had a tornado in the Marble Falls area 10-12 years ago, but we did not really see the effects of the tornado.

We had an uneventful day.

With only one day left in the Fiddler (our campervan’s license tag is FDL161, so it is the Fiddler), I feel a compulsion to describe life in a campervan.

The six of us share roughly 135 square feet of living space (that includes the bathroom and kitchen counterspace.  Put differently, we have 20 square feet of floor space when both lower beds are in use.