Did you go to summer camp? Did you like it?

[Sarah]

I didn't. Well, a couple of day camps as a little kid, but I never had any interest in sleepaway camp. All I wanted was to be an indentured servant at a barn, so I worked for rides from about the age of eleven on.

During and after college I spent my summers running riding camps. I LOVED camp as a counselor/administrator, but I don't regret having missed out on the experience as a kid.

[RandomAnthony]

I did not go to summer camp...I sort of thought it sounded cool, but I would have had to miss baseball, so I skipped.


My kids travel east to my mother-in-law's house for two weeks...and another week away would be too much...so no summer camp for them.

[[deleted user]]

Nope, I too would have missed baseball and swimming.

[[ JT ]]

No summer camp for me, either. Though I did take art classes every summer at Montserrat College of Art starting from a very young age and until I graduated from high school.

Other than that, I know I did a couple of "fun day activities" but I can't remember what they were.

[[deleted user]]

No, summer camps were nonexistent where I grown up. I would have loved to.

[Jackie "the Librarian"]

I didn't go, except for a three-day horse day camp, until I was in high school.

It was church camp, so there was lots of kumbayaing and other songs about God around the campfire. But there was also really great hikes, and a big swimming pool, and archery (I really liked archery!) and sleeping in bunk beds and staying up late talking, and I really had fun. I was even a counselor there one year when I got to college.

[Mona]

No summer camp but my brother and I did go to summer playground which we loved.

[Mary]

My parents sent my sister and me to a one-week Bible-type camp (Camp Massanutten) when we were quite young. We hated every minute of it. A few years later we went to Camp Mont Shenandoah for 6 weeks--"everyone" sent their daughters there, it's apparently de rigueur if you live in Richmond, VA. I liked it OK--horseback riding, canoeing, tubing down the Cowpasture River, archery, "mixers" with the local boys' camps--but I never went back. My sister went back year after year and eventually became a counsellor there for a couple of summers. Same with my baby sister.

I'm just not the camp "type" I guess. If I'd been a year older I would've been the one sneaking ciggies in the latrine and busting out to hitchhike into "town" after lights out.

[ms.petra]

I never went to camp as a kid, but as a Girl Scout Leader I volunteered for a 2 week sleep over camp in the Rocky Mountains as an adult counselor. The perk, my daughter attended free, under the stipulation that she would not be in my group. I saw her at campfires and at some meals, but we each had our own experience. It was so gratifying to teach these young girls outdoor and life skills, as well as working in a team, and being a mentor to them. I think for some kids camp can be a very liberating and life changing experience. They can reinvent themselves at camp and test themselves in ways they cannot at home.

[Félix]

Summer camp for me was running all over creation in the woods around my house for the whole summer. I never was one for group things. Or anything organized. I recall the rich kids up the street going -- but I don't recall being envious.

[[deleted user]]

Nope, too much fun to be had running the streets.

[Lobstergirl, el principe]

I never went to summer camp but I kind of wish I had. It always sounded like fun. I did go on several school camping trips that were probably 3-4 days each - we had one in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. My mother always had us enrolled in summer school - not hardcore stuff, but arts, crafts, drama, music, etc. We also did Vacation Bible School in the summers but that wasn't a sleepaway camp. My mother would encourage me to invite a heathen friend or two and they always enjoyed it. Also, our summer family vacations tended to be in the woods, or near mountains, so we swam and canoed and hiked. So I didn't feel deprived or anything.

[Pat]

I went to summer camp I think 4 times. It was a 2 week girl scout camp, a six hour bus ride away, in Eu Claire Wisconsin. I enjoyed everything but the mosquitoes and the daily swimming.

I really really enjoyed the camp fires. I became an accomplished fire starter and tender.

[Sally, la reina]

I looooooooooooooved summer camp! I went from 7th grade until I was a senior in high school, and then I was a counselor for two summers. Best friends of my life are camp friends. I met Sweeter through camp friends.
Love. Camp.

[[deleted user]]

Ahhhh such a lovely story Sally. I wish we had, had summer camp. Not that I would have been allowed to go anyway. ::major pout::

[Stacia (the 2010 club)]

I went once a year from about age 9 to 16. It was a great experience, and one that I looked forward to every summer because the same kids would come back each year. It was like coming home when you arrived at camp.

My older son had a really bad camp experience with his first camp (a YMCA) when he was around 9. We sent him because I wanted him to have the same experience that I did. He was so embarrassed to change in front of the other kids that he went around in a sweatshirt for 3 days in 90 degree heat and the counselor didn't pull him aside privately to ask why.

Needless to say, I filed a complaint. It almost scared me off from sending him to another camp, but we tried again a couple of years later and found one that he LOVED and he went 3 years in a row to it.

Moral of the story I guess is to do your research before sending a kid to camp...

[RandomAnthony]

Oh, poor kid! I'm not sending my kids to camp...but I'd probably be worried about the same, even though there's no indication (and there probably wasn't with yours, either, Stacia) they would run into any problems.