Girls Camp!

At the beginning of August I spent a week at Camp Zarahemla, a Church-owned property a few hours northeast of White Salmon, with about 65 teenage girls and 30 other adult women leaders. It was my first time at Girls Camp since I was 17, and I had a great time, despite missing my children and husband who were at home with Damon's parents.

The camp was on the shores of a small lake where we could swim and canoe. It was a gorgeous setting. Here's the view from the hill just a few yards away from our campsite.

The theme for our Girls Camp this year was "Light of the World: Unity, Belief, Example." Each cabin (tent, really) took a country as its own theme. Mine was the United Kingdom, of course. My fellow cabin mom, Kathy, and I decorated our campsite with a Union Jack and some iconic British images.

Our tent became the Zarahemla stop on the London Underground or "Tube" (London's subway system). The tents were quite nice, since they were set up on wooden platforms--no sleeping on top of rocks or tree roots--and you could stand up in them. However, the canvas "walls" were not attached to the platforms at the bottom. This created gaps where the very brave camp chipmunks could enter the tent. Those little guys were seriously bold, illiciting cameos in the camps skits as "Killer Ninja Chipmunks" and as targets for Harry Potter's spells. We had to keep all food out of the tents since the chipmunks would chew through bags to get at campers' unguarded snacks. Some people even had chipmunks jump onto picnic tables and grab cookies right from under their noses!

Here's Kathy with the phone box that she painted for our campsite:

We also created a list of American & British English equivalents so that our girls could see that we don't totally speak the same language as our cousins across the pond.

We had a fun week eating international dishes cooked in the lodge by our camp chef, creating skits (I got to play Queen Elizabeth as we saw "what would happen if the UK visited Camp Zarahemla), canoeing, playing games, and certifying survival skills amidst a mock pandemic (we told the girls that swine flu had mutated while we were at camp and we had to stay there until the quarantine was lifted; their nervous faces made the camp director reveal the mock part of the dramatization right away).

There were also many spiritual classes and evening firesides that taught the young women campers and us leaders more about being "examples of the believers." (The 2009 theme for the Church's Young Men and Young Women is 1 Timothy 4:12 "Be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.")

We stayed up too late and got up too early and were very ready to go home Saturday morning. Unfortunately, the car that came up from White Salmon to take home some of the young women BROKE DOWN. A bolt had fallen out of the brakes. Fortunately the camp caretaker had a large set of socket wrenches, one of the men who had come up to camp knew how to fix cars, and we were able to have another driver stop and buy a new bolt.

Kathy and I caravanned home with the fixed car and finally made it home around 5:00 Saturday evening. What a week!