Camp Kirkwood

 

It was Wednesday August 30, 2023. I had been dreading this day for weeks. It was the day that I went to my first school camp. It wasn’t the camp part that I was dreading, it was the fact we were heading straight for a hurricane! Now, I know what you’re thinking, it probably wasn’t that bad,(it was). We were two and a half hours away from the coast,(where the hurricane was supposed to hit), and we were driving two hours towards the coast! So, it was only fair to assume we were going to be hit by the hurricane.

There I was standing in a sea of duffle bags and pillows waiting for my friends to arrive. When they did we decided who sat with who and what bus we were going to sit on. And then when we got on the bus the teachers said that we did not have enough seats and we would have to just have to sit with random people and I had to sit in a two hour bus ride with someone I had never even met before. It was kind of awkward in the beginning, then we started talking and it wasn’t that bad.

When we got to camp, just as I suspected it was pouring rain and the winds were crazy. They told us to grab any bag, it didn’t matter who’s it was and we had to bring them to the pavilion by the dining hall. When we all got there they told us our cabins, where they were and to grab our bags and go. When we got to our cabins we had a ten minute break where we could get settled in and rest. After that we went to the dining hall for lunch. When we got to the dining hall,they gave us lunch and then told us what activities we were going to be doing. They put us into 6 groups and I was in group two. My group went to the pool first along with groups one and three. After that they told us to go back to our cabins to change. And then we had to do team building in the pouring rain. After that we did more activities like, forest ecology, orienteering or how to use a compass. Then we went back to our cabins and we had about thirty minutes of free time in our cabins before dinner. After dinner we went back to our cabins and hung out until lights out at ten.

Then next morning we went to breakfast at six and then we got into our groups for more activities. The first activity we did was more team building. Then we went to this thing called the v-swing where you are attached to a rope that your group mates pull and it is attached to a pulley system and it lifts you into the air. After that we went to lunch. Right after lunch we went to a pavilion by the pool and played some board games. We also had a rock paper scissors tournament (I won!). After that we couldn’t do anything because it was raining so much. So we stayed in our cabins for a while until it was time for dinner. After dinner we hung out in our cabins for a while. Then we had the choice of playing dodg eball in pouring rain or, watch a movie and I chose to watch the movie because I didn’t want to get wet. They also served us snow cones after the movie.

The next morning we had breakfast at six again. After breakfast we went to the pool again and jumped on what they called the “kanga jump” which was basically a giant trampoline. After that we went canoeing and we also went on a zipline over the lake. Then we went to meet the pig they had named bubbles. After we met the pig we had to grab our stuff and go home. On the way back they had resolved the bus problem and we could chose who we sang with and did not just get put with a random person.