High Adventure, day 2

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

I am amazed at how well I slept at camp. Lately on camping trips I’ve been bringing our queen sized air mattress because I can no longer sleep on the ground. Even these nice soft ground pads don’t work for me. Last year when we did our backpacking trip and lugged our backpacks to the top of a mountain I knew the air mattress was out of the question. I scoured the internet and found a six inch air mattress with a built in foot pump. It looked good so I took and chance and loved it. The best part is that it folds up into a very compact bundle that fits nicely in my hand. It works perfectly.

So, Wednesday morning I woke up nice and refreshed. Bronwyn Smith volunteered to cook for us all week and the meals were amazing. I have no idea why she volunteered, but boy am I glad she did. I guess she volunteered because her husband (he’s in the bishopric) and her three kids who are still at home were all at camp, but I think if I were in her place I might have stayed home to enjoy some alone time.

Wednesday was lake day and to make things even better, Mike Beams and Paul Seiter volunteered to bring their boats. A few kids wouldn’t go in the lake, but most of them were in the water right away. Being a mountain lake I assumed that the water would be cold but it was probably warmer than the ocean. The kids had a blast.

If I were to do it again I think with forty kids I would not even try and water ski. While skiing is perhaps more fun, most of these kids can’t get up on skiis and we wasted fifteen minutes trying to get them up. With forty kids, we couldn’t possible get them all a turn. It would take all day. 

Tubes, however, are a completely different story. On a tube every kid is successful on their first try and you can do four or five kids at once. 

I think every kid who wanted to ride on the tubes was able to do so multiple times.

I really wanted to go, but the kids were having so much I didn’t want to take time away from them. I’ll just have to talk Trevor into another boat trip.

We had lunch at the lake and spent most of the day there, arriving back at camp in the late afternoon with a couple of hours allocated for personal time.

Wednesday evening was brown bag skits, and the Deacons were in charge.

When I was given this assignment I had no idea what a brown bag skit was and when I learned what it was I was quite skeptical about how much fun it would be. As it turned out, it was a lot of fun and perhaps my favorite evening of the week.

We divided the kids into ten groups of five kids. Each group was given a brown bag with five random objects (props) in the bag along with a theme that they should use. We asked them to come up with a three minute skits using the theme and the props they were given. We gave them all ten minutes and then we started. Some of them did really well. In my group we had a stuffed animal and a kid named George so of course we based our skit on “Curious George”.

After the skits it was a devotional and then off to bed. Each group did their own devotional and I have to admit that the Deacons did very well. We had eight Deacons so we assigned two for each night and asked them to talk about one of the four goals of the youth program.

Luke talks about how Christ grew “in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” (Luke 2:52). The youth program askes the youth to make goals in each of these areas.

     Wisdom – intellectual goals
     Stature – goals for physical health
     Favor with God – spiritual goals
     Favor with man – social goals

They did amazingly well.

--------------------trivia--------------------

A sequoia tree drinks 100 gallons of water a day.

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