I don’t actually know anyone who went to those month-long, co-ed summer camps some of you went to. I think it’s an Eastern thing.
I went to Girl Scout camp for about 4 years, loved it. To this day I am the Queen of Camp Songs.
From 12-17 I also did girls’ camp for a week every summer, which was through my church. Also tons of fun.
When I was a kid, I thought camp was one of those things you read about in books that didn’t actually exist IRL (you know, like boarding schools). I honestly thought it was some kind of artificial construct which made for a good story setting, although I was willing to believe maybe such places had existed in the old days (you know, like the 1950s.)
Now I find that everybody got to go but me!
Same kind of stuff. After camp, I paddled whitewater until my late-20s.
Camp Kanuga.
Careful with those naughty appliances–they’ll give you water spots!
After listening to my sister talk for years about how great camp was, I finally was old enough to go the summer I was 8 or 9. I was super excited.
Within two days, I was calling my parents to come pick me up. I was MISERABLE.
It wasn’t so much the activities or the friends - those were fine. I simply couldn’t handle the complete lack of privacy. I think if I’d have been able to have a private room I would have been OK. As it was, I was constantly around other kids, had to sleep in a dormitory, eat with the other kids, etc. etc. and it was horrible.
I’m still like that. I can hardly stand living with my husband, and I love him dearly. Thank Gawd he gives me my space.
Nope, my brother and I didn’t go to camp. My mother didn’t work outside the home so she was around to watch us. I also seem to remember that she went as a kid and didn’t like it.
Like** taxi78cab**, I was very shy and I would have hated going away with strangers. I don’t think camp was ever presented as an option but if I had been I wouldn’t have like the idea. I also think us staying home played into my very frugal father’s plans.
Coed Bible camp, when I was 12. Not fun. Oatmeal and prunes for breakfast. I don’t remember what we had for lunch and dinner. No lake, no nature hikes, just Bible study, prayer, hymn singing, softball, and some piddly arts and crafts.
Last night at camp they put on a puppet show – a very vivid puppet show depicting the Everlasting Hellfire Waiting For Anyone Who Wasn’t Saved. It scared me so bad that I cried, and naturally, I “went forward” to be saved and was baptized at church a week later.
I went to boarding school, too.
Now I am worried that I may be a fictional character. 
I went to Girl Scout camp a few times, weekends usually. It was always a blast. My troop was all my best friends and the two coolest moms were our leaders. We always got in trouble at camp for various things, we were the ‘rebel’ troop I guess, hah. I remember one year, camp fell on my birthday. Our troop wasn’t too huge, and we were staying in little A-frame houses secluded with our own bathrooms and shelter/eating area. The troop leaders cooked us steak for dinner and even made me a cake, all over a campfire. It was very delicious, and very cool, I never knew you could make cake over a fire. I also remember garbage eggs, frying donuts, cleaning latrines (ewwww), carving our names into anything wooden with my crappy pocket knife, running away from creepy bugs, ghost stories, playing games like Indian (w/o booze of course!), swimmimg, crafts, everything. Good times.
I went to a Christian camp every summer for a week from 6th grade until the end of high school (the last few years I was volunteering). They kept the sexes separate as much as possible, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that someone at some time at some, um, unauthorized fun.
I also went to winter camp for a weekend for several years, but summer camp was much more fun.
I went to Day Camp the summers after 4th and 5th grades, and went to Boy Scout camp for about five years after that. Scout camp is different in that you go with people you know already, and ours, at least, wasn’t high on luxury. The last two years, when I was in a troop associated with our temple, we went to a Kosher scout camp (only in New York!) which had the advantage that we weren’t trusted to do the dishes and keep things separate. No homesickness ever and no sex. No girls in sight, in fact.
To me, this is just very, very sad.
Not for all summer. I’d go for a week or something, to church camp, or Girl Scout camp. In junior high I went to foreign language camp for a week. But the most transformative experience was an enrichment camp I went to as a teenager. Ten days long on a college campus, so it was not your typical “cabin and canoeing” camp. But it was paradise.
Hello Again’s post resonated with me. I went from being sort of geeky and considered “too smart” to be feminine and attractive (at school) … to being popular, sought after, and admired (at nerd camp). It helped that there was a shortage of girls there. Whatever, it was glorious for me. I stored up a lot of memories and good feelings to nurse me through the strain of being at an uncool place in the high school pecking order the rest of the year. I’m still in touch with one of my friends from there.
It wasn’t until I went to college that I met people who’d done the 'all summer long sleepaway camp." They had great stories.
And yes, my first kiss? At camp.
Oh, and one other thing: a friend of mine has a great story about how she and a friend found out about a camp that sounded great (they went to a presentation, I think–this was before the internet) and talked their parents into letting them go. When they got there, they learned it was a clothing-optional camp. I don’t know how you miss these detail, but I guess they were fairly naive. Not that there is anything wrong with a clothing-optional whatever, but imagine getting off the bus for a multiple-weeks experience far from kith and kin, not realizing that this is what you were in for.
I went to a weeklong 4-H camp in about 4th grade, and a weeklong “leadership” camp in high school. I think I have finally forgotten most of both of them. Both were terrible, terrible experiences. The lack of privacy, mentioned above, was one reason. The lack of anything outdoorsy or adventurous in either place was another. Having miserable food and no control over my time kind of rankled as well. And, there was the hard-to-overlook fact that the kids who were assholes on the outside of camp were still assholes inside camp. “Leadership” camp was particularly annoying since the pricks got to pretend to be, like, all deep and stuff. Fuckers.
Yes, I know it’s stupid, but after all these years I still carry the animosity.
ETA: OK, strike my second line. I guess I haven’t forgotten much of the experience. At least the details are now blurred.
You should have gone to the one I went to. At the same time I did.
I would definitely have snuck over to the girl’s side of camp to see you.
Oh definitely. I understand why they did it. Church doctrine says you have to be saved to get to heaven, and that this has to be done in a certain way – coming forward (physically) and being baptized. I wasn’t the only kid crying after the puppet show.
The puppet show could have been positive (angels, heaven, lots of joy and candy, etc.) and they would have gotten the same result.
Oh, there’s no doubt that would have been a great summer! We’d have been too much for those poor counselors to handle. 
Weird how that works out, isn’t it? There was one kid in particular that would spend the school year treating me like crap, but at camp he was always nice to me. Of course there was another guy whose hate for me went the whole year and it was mutual 
Anyways, my camp was nothing too special - a long weekend for 4H. We’d go hike to a swimming hole every year. One year we hiked up to swim, and as we were coming down I opted to wear only my swimsuit in order to dry out more quickly. I slid down the side of the hill on a rock and got an ass full of cactus spines, and spent the rest of the evening in the counselor’s RV having them removed. Boy was I popular at dinner that night! Heh.
I went to orchestra camp once, and it really sucked. That was during the school year in the winter though. Talk about miserable.
I went to a day camp near NYC one summer when I was a kid, I was maybe 6 years old. I hated it, mostly because I never knew where I was supposed to be. I guess I just had trouble following directions or something.
My mother sent us to a different day camp several years later when we lived in Putnam County, north of NYC. This was better, it was run by the town Recreation department and I already knew many of the kids. As best as I remember we did stuff like swimming and crafts, maybe some softball or something.
I went to two different sleepover Boy Scout camps in my early to mid teens. We went with our own troop but even then there were often kids you didn’t know (there were always kids quitting and joining Scouts).
I knew other kids who got sent to provisional troops, meaning their home troop didn’t go to camp and they were put in with a bunch of strangers to make a troop at the camp. Most of those kids hated the experience.
The Boy Scout camps were both pretty traditional: swimming, boating, hiking, horseback riding, crafts. It was usually a great time. We ate in the dining hall and didn’t have to cook or wash dishes, although we did have to take turns serving, and busing the tables. I didn’t mind the lack of privacy, maybe because I came from a fairly large family and had always had to share a room.
(For some reason the guys who worked in the kitchens (for pay) were always the strangest most unpleasant weirdos, like carnival geeks or something. I guess it was just a shitty job that payed crap, so they got the dregs).
Loved camp. LOVED IT! Every year from the age of 7 to 15 I spent one or two weeks at Camp Marydale, which used to be located in Northern Kentucky, near Latonia Race Course (now Turfway Park). Sadly, development has encroached and it’s gone, gone, gone. All my childhood memories, absorbed by Home Depot and McMansions. I was even on the cover of the camp brochure for several years!
I have fabulous memories of camp. It was a Catholic camp, so there was the fun of going to Mass outdoors. Horseback riding was a big reason I loved it so much. I loved sleeping in the cabins, sweltering in the hot August nights. Swimming until I was so exhausted I dropped into bed unconscious every night. Meeting friends I’d write to all year long, sometimes meeting them again the next year. Boyfriends … hey Danny, are you still out there, and do you remember me?
I was never-ever homesick. My mom still laughs about how 7-year-old me shoo’ed my parents out the cabin when they were hovering around, unwilling to leave their baby for a full week. “Mom, when are you all going? I want to be INDEPENDENT!” I am alleged to have said.
At the end of the week, I cried every year in the backseat of the car, all the way home.
I loved camp so much I went to every camp I heard about. 4-H Camp for probably four or five summers, Girl Scout Camp for at least one or two years.
And I’m sorry, but I’m the Queen of Camp songs. I could start singing this minute and not finish until midnight.
Father Abraham, had seven sons
Seven sons had Father Abraham,
And they didn’t laugh, and they didn’t cry …
All they did is go like this …