Flashback~Forget About it-Friday

My daughter is getting ready to leave for six weeks to attend a pre-college program. *Sigh* Six weeks is a long time. The longest by far that she will have been away from home. We will Skype and iChat and text and IM and gasp–even talk on the phone…all of which I am grateful for, but which won’t come close to replicating seeing her sweet face every day. *Sigh*

I attended overnight camp once when I was a kid…

Flashback-What I did on my summer vacation.

When I was 11 I attended Camp Hanover in Mechanicsville, Virginia. Up to that point, my summers were primarily spent playing with neighborhood friends, attending the occasional day camp, babysitting and watching a lot of TV. For some reason, my parents decided that I should/could (can’t remember who instigated this) do more the summer of 1978. If I remember correctly, I had a friend who was going with me but I think that person got homesick and left almost immediately. I wanted to do the same. I suffer suffered from separation anxiety and remember calling my mom to beg her to make the 20 minute drive to pick me up. Yeah, my sleep-away camp was only eight miles away from home. My mom told me to try it for at least two days (I was only signed up for a week of camp) and if after that time, I still wanted to come home, she’d come get me. Sounded fair.

Sure enough by day three I was having a blast. I was square dancing and making crafts. Singing the Ants go Marching and cooking smores around what was a nightly campfire. I even swam in the nearby lake despite the fact that a Water Moccasin was swimming there too. Best part of camp? I met a boy I liked. Don’t remember his name, don’t remember what he looked like, don’t remember where he was from. What I do remember is that he fed me my first pick-up line. And I ate it up! We were hiking and it started to drizzle when my camp crush whispered, “You better get out of the rain.” “Why?” I being genuinely clueless, whispered back. His reply? “Because sugar melts.” Uh-yeah! At this point not only did I not want to go home, I wanted to stay for a second week. So my mom and dad signed me up for week two.

This is where things went horribly wrong. Apparently there can be too much of a good thing. And, you really should quit while you are ahead. Day two of my second week of camp I got really sick. Really sick. Pee on yourself sick. Kick people out of their bunks in the middle of the night sick. I had a temperature of 105 and was sent (after in a fever induced delirium I told everyone in my cabin to wake the hell up) to the camp infirmary. Needless to say, I could not wait to see my parents the next day. I remembered just enough of my actions (which did indeed include wetting myself) to be mortified. I would never return to Camp Hanover. Or any other overnight camp for that matter. And, come to think of it, I never had someone confuse me with sugar again. I also haven’t peed on myself since that time, so I guess life is about tradeoffs.

How did you spend your summer vacations? Did you attend overnight camp?