Rewind, Part Two

After spending some time with my wonderful family, I loaded up on my car with my trunk, several plug in fans, and cans of sunscreen and bugspray to head to, you guessed it, CAMP!! We had a couple of weeks for boat driver training followed by staff training. It was fun to do boat driver training this year because Ryan, Clay, and myself got to be in charge of teaching the less experienced boat drivers. I had to learn a lot about boats in a short amount of time...and whatever I didn't know, I just pretended like I did until I could figure it out--something I feel like I did a lot of this summer!

There is no way that I could sum up this summer in one blog alone, or ten posts for that matter...but I'll at least tackle the first half as best as I can in this post. The first part of the summer proved to be a bit more of a challenge than the second half. By the time second half rolled around, we had a routine and a schedule and the expectations had been set. What made the first half such a challenge was settling into those routines, finding out what did and didn't work, and still doing our job and working with the staff the whole time.

To be completely honest, it wasn't alway easy being the only girl on the dock (and when I say that, I mean on the dock full time with Ryan and Clay). Ryan and Clay were AMAZING, incredible, and wonderful co's and they were a huge reason that my summer was so worthwhile. It was hard for some guys (well, one guy on staff in particular) to take directions from a girl...but we smoothed things over in the end. All of that to say, this summer wasn't easy but it was more than worth it.

At nights, I got to help out Julia Suddath, the head girls' counselor, with TAPS which was one of my favorite times of the day. We got to see all of the campers and have some great time to catch up with the counselors to see how their day had gone.

The first half of the summer flew by faster than I feel like it ever has! After training, we just right into the week long family camp and then two weeks of campers before the first term staff left. Only the whole summer staff was there for Jump Start, a Monday through Thursday morning camp for little ones that are trying out the whole "camp thing".
Then we had a long weekend off for the Fourth of July! I brought Katy Fisher home with me and Kasey to run the Peachtree Roadrace in Atlanta. It's the world's largest 10K and it was Katy's first time, Kasey's second, my fourth, and my dad's 21st time to run in!!
We showered, napped, and ate a big 4th of July cookout lunch with my family before getting back on the road to TN. Katy and I didn't want to miss out on being with friends from camp and Kasey still had the long drive back to Kentucky to make...Katy and I met up at the McLaughlin's house for some dinner and then going to the walking bridge downtown to watch the fireworks...And yes, we were all wearing tie-dye shirts downtown. Needless to say, we got some funny looks, but we didn't care! haha


That's the halfway through the summer mark. We only had 3 short weeks of campers and clean up week after that, but that will have to wait for another blog post. I should probably get back to working on some job applications, but I noticed how long it had been since my last update and I finally have had a chance to sit down with internet access, so I take the chances when I get them! I'll get around to the third and final part before too long so I can eventually get back in the habit of doing regualar blogging!