Summer "Camp"

So we dropped Little Smoot off at summer "camp" this weekend.  I have to keep putting "camp" in quotes, because her version of "camp" this summer is a drastically different-looking experience than what she has done in past years.  And it's a whole HECK of a lot different than when I was a camper, back in the Paleolithic era.

We dropped Little Smoot off on Sunday, expecting that she would be staying in the same sort of cabins where she spent her time the last few years at the same place.  But this time she was assigned to a building that hardly seems like a "camping" experience to me.  In the future, if we visit a fancy Hilton Hotel, she is going to feel let down, compared to her "camping" arrangement this week.

She has a room that she'll share with one other camper and two counselors.  It's modern, nicely furnished and carpeted, has its own private bathroom and shower, and it even has air conditioning for heaven's sake.  Air conditioning!

Let me tell you about the accommodations I had at camp when I was little.  Note that I didn't use quotes around the word camp this time.  We had these musty, cinderblock cabins which were mostly held together by dust and spider webs.  In fact, we often took showers with spiders that were the size of soccer balls.

Our rooms were lit by a few light bulbs that hung down from the rafters, and most of the time only a couple of them actually illuminated when they were turned on.  (Being young adolescent boys, we were always illuminated and turned on, but that's another story entirely.)  And if you were creative, you could actually trap a fellow camper in his sleeping bag and tie him up to the rafters, not that any of us ever did such a thing, of course.

Camp food was another issue entirely.  It was always consistently horrible, and we used to drink "bug juice" with it, which I do believe was made from actual bugs.  Not Little Smoot's camp, though!  I have had the opportunity to be a counselor at her camp for a couple summers, and the food at this camp is not only edible, it's actually GOOD!  They have a fancy little salad bar and everything.

Last summer when I was a counselor there, we stayed in a typical cabin.  It was much fancier than what I had grown accustomed to while growing up, but it was still something I would call camping, without the quotes.  We immediately discovered that something had apparently died in our bathroom, either somewhere in the ceiling, or in the floorboards, and it smelled putrid for the entire week.  But that is camping!

Frankly, when I go back as a counselor next month I am hoping that we'll get the typical old-style cabins that I'm used to... if only because I really think of that as being a big part of the whole summer camp experience.  I have a feeling that when Little Smoot gets home this weekend, we're going to have to put little mints on her pillow for a week or so, just to ease her back into life at home.  Yeesh.