Saturday, October 23, 2010

Off to Camp

In October Mr. Man had his first long trip away from home with his elementary class. He went to Opal Creek for four days and three nights for an intense outdoor educational adventure.

He seemed ambivalent about the trip in the weeks leading up to it, but on the morning of departure, he was ready to go!


There was plenty of time for photo ops with friends as we waited for the bus to arrive to take the kids on the 2-hour drive.


There was much cheering as the tour bus pulled into the parking lot!


The three nights without him seemed so long! By the second night it was hard to adapt to the fact he wasn't coming home.

When we picked him up on Friday, we hugged him and asked him how it was. In a very exasperated voice, he said, "They only fed us three times a day!"

We've heard many stories from him about camp after the fact and these are the things he enjoyed:

  • Tending a wood stove in your cabin is really cool. He was apparently the expert fire tender for his cabin. He's convinced we need one in the house we haven't yet bought.

  • His entire class could not link arms around a 2000 year old tree. He's amazed by the idea that the ancient trees have been around since Roman times.

  • Playing poker is fun. He and the boys in his cabin (18 of them) played poker at rec time, in the evening until lights out at 10pm and from 5-7am in the morning. As you can imagine, there was a lot of Lady Gaga "Pokerface" being sung.

  • Despite waterproof boots, it's still possible to walk in the river and get your feet totally soaked. When we picked him up his feet were all wrinkly from being wet and we imagine they were like that most of the week.

  • He saw the remains of the old mine that used to exist on the property and enjoyed going inside.

We thought he'd be tired from a long week of wilderness education, but alas, when asked what he wanted to do he opted to go to Multnomah Falls.

We started at the Vista House, which overlooks the Columbia Gorge:


He dorked around in an old rotted out tree:



We saw beautiful waterfalls:


We drove back home and piled our tired boy into bed.

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