If you're my 'regular' audience then you might have noticed that this post is chronically overdue. Due to that fact and me leaving you hanging near the end of the summer I'm going to do a (hopefully) brief post wrapping up the last week of camp and then later tonight or tomorrow (most likely tomorrow) I shall do a wrap up on the camp season as a whole.
So without any apology and with absolutely no further ado I'll just start writing things here.
Tuesday was a typical Tuesday.. it consisted of 3 trail rides and was only unusual in that it was the last Tuesday of the summer. Any formal acknowledgement of that fact by myself or any other staff members was greeted with loud and aggressive denials by others on staff. It was also a notable day for the fact that I took another nap after lunch, once again permitted by the 'beta' schedule that week and made necessary by the absolute exhaustion that had built up over the last few weeks. To put this in perspective... it was my 3rd nap of the summer, and the second of that week.
wednesday (day 57 if anyone was still counting) was lake day... annd my notes are a bit fuzzy by now so I'm sure it was a blast. I remember good times and I may have made a point of tracking down the few staff I hadn't dunked yet and go that part of the to do list completed. But I don't know that I'd admit to that under normal circumstances, whee for the internet and my propensity to ramble.
Thursday was a day that contains one of my favorite memories from camp. It also contained the bittersweet process of doing our activities for the last time that summer, the last time to saddle, the last time to get out and ride, the last time to unsaddle. In the context of camp or anything that you love so dearly it becomes very difficult to go through that process but at the same time I just had to keep telling myself that it's the first time for the kids... and it's not manly to cry.
The story I referenced happened during the counselor meeting, a group of kids ran up to me and said that they'd found a few expended shotgun shells on the edge of camp and wanted to see if we could go look for more. Now for some odd reason (what I now view as divine providence) I had an unusual amount of energy at just that moment in time so I decided it would be good to go hiking with the kids! Why not? it's thursday! and there are only 3 or 4 of em that want to right? So I agreed, only to find out we had about 10-15 kids that wanted to go... meh it's camp! lets have some fun eh? turns out we had a blast scampering over the rock face for almost an hour and found all sorts of interesting things. the only downside to the whole experience was that one kid slipped and stuck his hand on a cactus but then we got to hang out in the nurses office while he got all the spines pulled out.
Friday was the last day of camp and the first of the goodbyes... admittedly the most difficult part of the summer. I don't know what else to say at this point except that to all of you who were a part of the long road this summer... it was an honor.
I'll throw out a pair of posts tomorrow, one a wildly introspective end of the season return to the real-world thing, the other a more recent post about what's been going on in the camp world lately. Now that it has been promised... don't be particularly surprised if it is late.
