Preparing For Summer Camp

My troop is leaving for summer camp on Sunday. We’ll be heading to Camp Orr High Adventure Base. This is a really big deal for most of the boys because the majority of them have never been to a scout summer camp before.

Here is a little background info on my troop to get a grasp on the situation. There are twenty-six boys total. The troop itself is very young. It re-charted in May 2008. Most of the boys started last year or just crossed over this year. Three boys are over thirteen. A few of our older boys who have transferred into the troop have been to Orr before.

Of the twenty-six, nineteen are going and are very excited about it. I’m also very excited about taking this group to summer camp. I went to this summer camp my second year in scouts about 13 years ago (man, that makes me feel old). I personally had a terrible time. Got home sick, cried two days straight (yeah, I said it), and my troop was really accident-prone.

I have a very positive outlook with this group because many of them have gone to a local summer camp, Camp War Eagle, in previous years. So hopefully homesickness won’t have to be dealt with (much). I’m rather concerned about Wacky Wednesday.

For those of you who don’t know, this is the day when anything and everything tends to go wrong and it’s always on Wednesday. This is the third night of the camp and most new boys haven’t camped more than two nights.

My WW at this camp involved me pouting the whole day from being homesick and getting a scoutmaster conference on why we don’t need to cry, my buddy gashed his finger open while carving a neckerchief slide, and another buddy fell out the back of his tent and broke his footlocker at the same time. I’m still debating on heading to my local Wal-Mart to pick up an arsenal of water guns to keep spirits high. Worse come to worse I’ll distract them by bugging them about the new Transformers movie that comes out the week after camp.

So, I consider myself fully packed right now. All of my junk is piled up by our kitchen table and I REALLY hope I don’t have to get into it before camp. I’m not exactly sure how my time at camp will be spent. They have this “Scoutmaster Merit Badge” that I’m going to work on, but they don’t have any details on its schedule. Just in case it’s one of those single day events, I’ve packed tons of books to read including: The Shack, The Scoutmaster’s Other Handbook, Get Off My Honor, the 1911 edition of the Scout Handbook and several other good books.

Planning on doing some experiments with some new gear and new ideas during the week. Hopefully when I get back I’ll have some cool stuff to post about and some cool pictures to share.