Another Camp Quality has been…

Well I’m exhausted after another long week of camp. Don’t get me wrong, I loved every minute of it! Well, maybe not the part where we had to put up 20 tents, but the rest was great!!

I had an 8 year old girl, Courtney, who’s brother had cancer a couple of years ago. She was going full force the whole camp. Could hardly keep up!! She had an attention span of a goldfish.

All staff and companions arrived at camp (in Awakeri, near Whakatane) on Saturday (7th) to have a last minute training and briefing before we got the kids on Sunday. That night, we went to a restaurant in Whakatane for dinner where we got to socialise and just be normal adults for one more night.

We picked the kids up on Sunday afternoon after unloading stuff of buses and putting up about 20 tents! That night, we had a barn dance!! We had country singers in and some line dancers. Always a good way to start camp! Normally we have a disco, but the theme of camp was Wild West, so a barn dance was appropriate!

Monday morning was spent at the lake. I don’t know which lake…..Roto-something. We had the jet boat come with a few boats to give the kids rides (ok, and adults too!), kayaks and general swimming. It was a nice, relaxing morning. Electives were in the afternoon, which are a huge bunch of activities the kids can choose from, and they can do 2 a day. Monday we did Wax Art and Bead Making. The handy thing about having a camper that can do their own thing without help, means you can make your own stuff! I made 3 cool wax pictures (one I gave to Mum who was stuck in the kitchen all week) and made some cool bead earrings. Monday night the older kids (9+) went offsite so us younger ones played games and did some chocolate making.

This is how you make the wax pictures - with an iron!

These are a couple of pictures I made
(also gave one to Mum but similar to the purple one)

Tuesday we did more electives and went to the aquatic centre in Whakatane. Those electives we did pokerwork and pistol shooting. Tuesday night we a cool guy come in and tell stories and legends. He finished early so the kids thought it would be great to sing…..

Wednesday we had more electives, but by this stage, Courtney didn’t want to do much so we flitted between everything and eventually sat at the crafts table for a while. Our morning activity was what the older kids got to do a couple of nights ago……paintball shooting! No, not to each other. We just had targets to shoot at. They company had huge versions of lots of games that we could play with while waiting for our turn, like Jinga that was nearly as tall as Courtney, Connect 4 that was about as tall!! Heaps of fun for the kids……and us! Wednesday night we had a quiet movie night. The younger kids watched Madagascar while the older ones watched Mr Deeds (after the young ones went to bed. I love having the younger ones!!!)

Thursday morning was our Wild West day! We had Action NZ come in and set up some activities - mechanical bull, knife throwing, pistol shooting, laser clay bird shooting and whip cracking! We also had some of the local Lions group come down with their 4-wheel drive bikes and give rides and magic carpet rides. I had a go a knife throwing, and got about 4 in out of 15 throws! Clay bird shooting was a whole other story! I couldn’t get my gun working – sadly it was a user error! In the afternoon we had our concert and dressed up in our Wild West costumes. Normally the concert is in the evening, after dinner, but they decided to try it in the afternoon as we often run out of time for everyone to do their skits. We did a skit as a tent (3 girls and 3 companions) which one of the girls came up with. After dinner we all hopped on the bus and went out to a farm where they had a huge bonfire! We sang some silly songs (most of which came out of an old girl guide song book!). The fire was too big to cook marshmallows so we headed back to camp for supper (plus it started to drizzle – the first all week!)

Friday we all packed up, dropped the kids off to waiting parents, had a quick debrief and headed home. Ahhh Home Sweet Home! To keep with the standards of every year, us companions and staff met up in town on Friday evening for a drink and to socialise again. We were in Hamilton and there was a group in Tauranga. Got home about 1am and just CRASHED!!! Didn’t get up till 11am this morning!!