Our Time Travel Tuesday topic this week, hosted as always by My Life as Annie, is our favorite summer camp experiences.

Wow — I’ve been sitting here trying to remember summer camp (you have to remember my childhood was a long time ago. 🙂 ) I do remember going to Girl Scout camp in my elementary years, making “sit-upons” — carpet squares that were somehow encased in something plastic and had rope or something through one end so we could tie them around our waists but have something dry and clean whenever we wanted to sit down (doesn’t that sound just so classy? LOL!) I remember learning to make s’mores, swimming in a lake (well, splashing in a lake), walking around with flashlights from the main meeting area to the tents, ghost stories and giggling girls.

Then there was a gap in my camping years until I began going to a good church during my junior year of high school and then to a Christian camp that summer. There instead of tents we were in a building of some sort with several bunk beds. I remember our pastor’s wife was there, a very straight-laced and and no-nonsense proper lady, and another lady was determined to do something prankish to her, but out of respect never did. She sure had fun thinking about it, though. 🙂 I can’t remember a lot about the camp itself, but I do remember enjoying being saturated with preaching and devotional times. That was a new experience for me, being totally away from the distractions of normal life for a week and being influenced on every side by the Word. We had some of the ladies from church as our counselors, and it was neat to see them in a different role and hear them lead devotions at night.

The one camp experience I remember the most, though, was a winter camp that I went to while on a college Christmas break. Jim and I were dating and his parents flew me from Texas to Idaho to meet them. During part of that time several people from Jim’s church were going to a winter camp with a group from the church of the pastor’s oldest son, who was a youth pastor in California. The camp we went to was an old Girl Scout camp in southern Idaho. It was fairly primitive — no indoor heat except for a fireplace, no indoor toilets, no electricity except when someone ran the generator. I’m from southeast Texas where we had snow once that I remember growing up; in college in South Carolina it was colder and we had snow more often, but nothing like snow and cold in Idaho in December. Thankfully other folks in the church contributed boots and other such gear so that I could go. I remember stepping off the “trail” and sinking hip deep in snow and being afraid of losing the borrowed boot, not being thrilled about tramping out to the the frozen outhouse, and getting buried in new snow one morning when we went down a hill on inner tubes and being so cold I couldn’t move. Jim had to take my muffler off and shake the snow out of it for me. I do remember having a lot of fun times during those few days, though, and the best thing was that one young girl was saved, and later her whole family began coming to church there and were strong members of that church for many years.