Summer Camp, from the other side

Traveling with younger teenagers is an experience i will not soon forget. Four of them flew to the states to go to camp at Double Head Resort with me and my old church in Nashville for the week. I drive to Birmingham to meet them and take them the rest of the way. As i'm driving to the rendezvous, i pass a beautiful barn up on a hillside about 45 miles out of Birmingham. It sits in front of a large pond with nice fence rows all around. I admire the barn, not knowing that this would be one of six times that i would pass it. When they first hop in my vehicle, one of the girls informs me that she left her wallet on the plane and that it had not been turned in yet. One of the boys tells me that he was pick pocketed at the airport, so he also has no money. About the time he is finishing with his story, i receive a text from his mother letting me know that someone turned in his wallet, they found it in his seat on the plane. I wonder how the pickpocketter knew which seat was his, he must be a professional. So we are 50% at this point on making it to camp with our belongings.

It is obvious by the nonstop twitching and wide eyes that they have done nothing on the ride from Atlanta to Birmingham but dip candy into sugar and take the occasional breath. Their stomachs are full, but i decide that a little substance will do good to suck up the remaining sugar that has not yet entered their system. Wendy's is the unanimous decision. "Go ahead, order what you want". I realize i should have been more specific, rookie mistake. The two boys each order a frosty.....thats it....just frosties (sugar). The girls split a frosty and some actual food. Instead of prevention, i could have very well sent one of them into a sugar endosed coma. How to explain that to a parent was not in "Taking Kids to Summer Camp for Dummies".

Well we get on the road and radio station roulette begins. Round and round we go....static...static...half a song...more searching...girls love the country songs, unfortunately neither one of them were up on their shotgun calling reflexes, so more searching...another half song...then a song they love which i am forced to change because of its lyrics (that WAS in the book)...and so the story goes. We are having a pretty good time, everyone is excited to be going and are asking all kinds of questions i can't answer because i myself have never been to this particular camp before. The guys number 1 topic of conversation are the girls who will be there. One of them notices the barn (passing #2) and they start talking about how cool it is. After shortly passing the barn (remember, 45 miles out of Birmingham) the other girl says, "Oh no, i lost my purse!". We go through the whole "when is the last time you saw it?" dialog, all the while telling the boys to be quiet and to leave her alone, to find out the last time it was seen was on the back of the chair at Wendy's....."who needs another frosty?". So we turn around to head back to recover the goods. Oh look, there's the barn (passing #3). We make it to Birmingham and the kids laugh at the cars going in the other direction because they are sitting in traffic. I wonder to myself how long it will take them to realize that we will make a u-turn and get into that line ourselves. We make to Wendy's but I determine that letting them go in is a bad idea, so I go myself to retrieve the treasure. After getting in the car and getting the inventory on what's in there, I realize that I spent more on gas in my Tahoe than what is in the purse..................thanks OPEC. Luckily the traffic is flowing nicely as we are departing the city (again) so it is smooth sailing. 45 miles later we see the good ole barn (passing #4). No problems after this point. Along the way one of the boys points ahead to a distant hillside and remarks, "From here to there is St. John!". I'm not sure it was quite nine miles but he was right, this was definitely more land than we had seen in a long time. We make it to camp just in time to be the last ones through the dinner line. As we walked in the boys immediately began taking account of the girls around them.

After dinner it was time for us to find our cabins. The girls went off with their female leader and I took the boys to our cabin to see who else i was in charge of for the week. I walk into my first "Of course, that makes perfect sense....." moments of the week. There is a futon mattress and pillows all piled up in the middle of the floor. The Nashville kids had already been here for a few hours since we were running the Barn Circuit for the last three hours.
"Why is everything in the floor?"
"We were jumping over the balcony onto it."
"Of course, that makes perfect sense......"

"Why is there a steak knife on the floor?"
"Oh, well, if you take it and toss it like this, it will stick in the ceiling (demonstrating as explaining) like this"
"Of course, that makes perfect sense......"

The cabin is right on the lake. We have our own dock which it takes only 3 minutes of being there before the rocking chairs end up on it. We are all pretty excited to be at the lake and we run around checking things out. I walk back inside to hear a noise, a noise that i am pretty sure i have heard before. If this noise were played over the radio in one of those "name that sound" contests, i would definitely have tickets to a concert.

"I thought i told you not to throw knives at the ceiling?"
"We aren't, we are throwing them at the wall." says the kid at the top of the stairs
"Of course........"

Needless to say we didn't eat anything the rest of the week that needed to be cut. By the way, if anyone ever says they bet you can't stick a butter knife in drywall, take that bet.....it can be done.....

This is just the first five hours. Other things we learned at camp were it is possible to fill a water balloon with chocolate pudding, which is valuable to know. You can also fill one with lighter fluid, but it will soon pop because it eats through the rubber in seconds. If you fill one with a carbonated beverage, and shake it, the gas will expand the balloon and it will eventually pop. I feel that these few bits of information would definitely be useful in the second edition of "Taking Kids to Summer Camp for Dummies".

More learnings not involving water balloons:
When it comes to driving kids on JetSki's, the quality of the ride is determined by how close you can come to being flung off X number of times without actually being thrown off. Throwing them off is also acceptable. If you don't throw them off at least once, then they don't realize how close they came the other times which is the thrill of the moment. Other skills required to be known as the guy that everyone wants to ride with is the ability to send a wave of water onto an unsuspecting group of people on the pontoon boat (without actually running into said pontoon boat).
Young teenagers do not understand the concept of the "full flush", i will leave it at that.

We had a great week and they want to go back next year. We stopped at a gas station on the way back to Birmingham and you would have thought we were at Disney World. On St. John the gas stations only have gas, and that they only have sometimes. More candy was bought and novelty rings were tried on. $30 worth of food was brought to the register with only $10 cash to pay for it, so one by one, items were put back, with a subtotal given until we had it down to $10. Kids can evenly divide a bag of skittles into four even piles, but adding up the cost of that candy remains a mistery to them. Stopping at as many gas stations as possible on the way to camp next year has been added to the itinerary by the group. "Next time I come to the states, I am going to bring $50 and spend it all at a gas station!"

On the way back to Birmingham we pass the barn (passing #5) and find a Chik-Fil-A to eat once we reach the city to meet our rendezvous. Of course, a coke is spilled on the table. Actually half on a tray and half on the table/floor. Upon taking the tray to the garbage, the coke caught in the tray finds its way over the edge and leaves a stream from the table to the trash......"of course, that makes perfect sense...."


Look, theres the barn again as i head back to Nashville.

I just watched an iquana fall out of a tree from my office window. It was beautiful.

(he ran off and was not injured)

Today i watched two iguanas have sex. it wasn't beautiful.