Starter camp

Starter camp is great, and such a clever concept!
It's basically a one week camp for the little girls who want to go to Ton-A-Wandah but ether they or their parents want them to try it out first. The oldest girls at starter camp are around 11, with the youngest being only 4!

It is a very small camp and I believe that we only had 45 kids there! This meant that there were only 4 cabins and 8 counselors. I was placed in Spruce cabin with my new awesome Co-Co Jourdan, she and I operated on another level. We were so on the same page with every little thing including our dry humor. Those poor kids.
We had the oldest girls and only had 5 campers. We were the Spruce Spookies and our door decorations were these demented looking creatures that should not have been allowed! One of our campers chose her creature out of the lot as, and I quote: "I'll take this one, it looks like it has the least amount of issues."

The kids all get a predetermined schedule and, because of the "understaffed" nature of the camp, all the counselors have to teach all the activities! We all swopped in and out of horseback riding, karate, dance, arts and crafts, archery, swimming, rock climbing, activity sampler and tennis.
Caroline and I managed to match our schedules and taught everything but arts and crafts and activity sampler. It was such fun to be able to teach all sorts of great things and to do them with Caroline was amazing! To not have fun was impossible, and the kids all fed off of that energy.

A huge perk of working starter camp is the camp wide trip to Sliding Rock! It's sort of self explanatory but it's a huge natural rock that the stream runs over. It is so smooth that you can slide down it and into a freezing plunge pool at the bottom. It was so great and all the kids loved it! Bonus: we then went for ice cream on the way back to camp.

The camp is only 5 days so it passes in the blink of an eye but I absolutely loved it! After a triple session on Hilltop, having the little girls was so refreshing and such a different type of fun! We said goodbye as soon as we had said hello and sent them on their way, with the promise of seeing them all next summer at the main camp!

We then had to say goodbye to even more of our staff members and then went off on our 2 night session break before the Henderson County Young Leadership Program Camp came in. Caroline and I decided to do our own thing and booked into a hotel rather than hang around at camp.
We spent our time relaxing and eating ice cream and doughnuts, watching tv and joking around. I wouldn't have changed a thing.