Did you go to summer camp as a kid?

My oldest, now 16, has been doing camps for awhile now. It started with summer camp at Ursuline a few summers before we moved. Here in Atlanta, she's done a ton of different camps with mixed but mostly positive results. I'll highlight the most memorable...

We tried camp at the Y once because it was literally next door and super convenient. Having said that, of course that only lasted a couple weeks. The first day she came home complaining that no matter what the camp "theme" was for the week (dance, cooking, basketball, they had many), ALL campers ended up in park under the shelters after lunch. I thought maybe it was for the first day. Turns out she was right. She did her time and that was it for the Super convenient option.

Her favorite camp would probably be an all girls Orchestra camp. This was a sleep away camp at a local college in Northern Georgia. She did this one a couple summers up until COVID. She had a blast each time. She also gained the reputation as someone who could get things. Unbeknownst to me, Costco and I were unwittingly operating as her suppliers for the black market snack cartel she was running after curfew. She was done in by pictures saved to the cloud. She had taken pictures of her ill gotten cash laid out on her bed. Smh.

I don't know if it count as camp, but last summer she did 2 weeks in Germany "studying" German in the morning and doing field trips in the afternoon with her classmates. She loved it, but I was a nervous wreck the first week she was gone. It's one thing for your kid to be in another state. I can still get to them in a few hours. In a different continent!?! I didn't sleep the first 48 hours she was gone. About a week into the trip, she calls us about 1AM in the morning her time. Her first words were, "just want you to know I'm fine, I'm back home now, but this is what happened." Apparently she and 2 friends got separated from the group on the train and they ended up missing their stop. Long story short, it was a good reminder that yeah, she's been paying attention all these years and knows what to do and not do. This experience actually helped me relax a little bit. She's going to be OK, LFDC, relax.

The coolest camp was also the hardest camp to get her into. There's a children's bookstore here that runs these amazingly immersive summer camps. To get a spot in this particular camp, you have to enroll in person on the day registration opens. So that's how I found myself camped out in front of a bookstore at 3am on a cold January, winter morning to hold a spot at Hogwarts camp. 8th in line with 6 hours to go. Well worth it though. They went the whole 9 yards. She received a letter, was sorted, triwizard tournament, anything you can think of...they found a way to do it. Perhaps the most impressive thing about it according to her was the butterbeer. We've had butterbeer at Universal Orlando and at the Harry Potter Warner Bros Studio Tour in London. She claims the camp's version was the best one. We were both really big (she's less forgiving of the author who shall not be named, I should be too) Potterheads still. The smile on her face every day of that camp was priceless. Definitely worth the wait in the freezing cold.


Did I do summer camps as a kid?
No. I played in the sugar cane fields and fished cans out of ditches using mop sticks with a nail in them. ...like every other kid who lived along Bayou Lafourche.