Summer Camp Shenanigans, Part 3: Thunder on a Sunny Day Effectively Wrecks Everything

Hello lovelies!

Sorry I didn't post yesterday; I had an orthodontist appointment in the morning (which is when it's most convenient for me to post) and school has also started back up for me, so things got a little tied up. And when I tried to post in the afternoon, I ended up watching an episode of Firefly with my mum. Fun times, but not productive.

Welcome to part 3 of "Summer Camp Shenanigans"! When we last left off, Monday was over and we were about to begin Tuesday.

So, without further ado, on with the show blog post!

Tuesday morning got off to a slower start. That is, until my patrol leader comes up and asks me if I'm afraid of heights. "No," I say, mildly confused. "Why?" And then she says that she wants to take us to the challenge tower today but she needs a certain size group.

The challenge tower is this 40-ish foot tall structure with a rock wall and all sorts of things to climb, and then there's a zipline. It's something I've wanted to go on since my first year of camp, so naturally I got excited.

When we got to the barn, the alarm wasn't going off and we could groom a horse in peace.

When we rode, they put me and Niner in the front of the line that day, and for some reason the idea of being the first one to do things made me a bit nervous. But hey, riding is riding, no matter where you are in the line, and it gives you a bigger challenge trying to steer a horse in the opposite direction from where they want to go.

Then we have lunch, and then Turtle Time.

And then the challenge tower.

The walk ended up being a good 20-ish minutes long. We crossed parts of the camp that I'd never been to on the way, and then we got into the clearing where they have the challenge tower.

Let me just say, that thing is huge when you see it in real life for the first time. All I'd ever seen of it was pictures.

I was starting to question my confident "No, I'm not afraid of heights".

We stood under this little tent that had been set up on one edge of the clearing, and as the counselor in charge of the challenge tower was going over safety things and helmets and harnesses and stuff, I was clinging onto every word while silently freaking out.

And then, we heard a low rumble.

"Oh no," said the counselor in charge of the tower. "Please tell me that wasn't what I think it was."

And then there came a message over the radio, saying that they'd heard thunder.

And it was a perfectly sunny day, too.

We were pretty sure that we could wait the thirty minutes and go back to doing what we were doing, but the thunder kept coming, over and over, to the point that we just decided to throw in the towel and go home.

We walked back to the unit, and as I stared up at the challenge tower for what would be the last time that year, I thought to myself, "This is the third year in a row where something's come up and we couldn't do this."

And I actually started crying. And not just one dramatic tear, like they do in movies. I mean like actual, legit, "this majorly sucks" crying.

Now, normally, I take things like this pretty well. I've always been the stoic friend during sad movies, the one who never cries if she can avoid it. But something about not being able to do the challenge tower disappointed me a lot more than usual.

So the counselor of the other patrol (who was in charge of all of us because my patrol leader was busy and wouldn't be at the tower until four) told me that since this whole challenge tower thing was obviously a pretty big deal to me, she would try her hardest to work something out.

But that still didn't cheer me up.

We ended up walking to a little arts and crafts room in the basement of one of the other cabins (it was actually a garage, but we use it for crafty things) and a bunch of the girls did woodburning, but I sat in the back of the room and stared at a piece of paper in a really, really awful mood.

And then my patrol leader comes out of what I later learned to be a massive storage room, and she's made a Dumbledore costume out of a piece of felt (a beard) and a really really big piece of some sort of fabric.

She then promptly asked me to guess who she was, and even though I shook my head multiple times, she wouldn't take no for an answer, so finally I just said, "Dumbledore?"

And something about seeing my patrol leader dressed up as Dumbledore actually made me laugh. Hey, it was a pretty ridiculous get-up!

So I started trying to design a costume for Harry Potter night on Thursday. A pretty tough task considering that if I make my costume, I like to have access to a sewing machine and I like to make the costume really, really accurate. But hey, I wasn't gloomy anymore.

We ended up going to the trading post (our camp's store) and I bought a hoodie (which is very cozy) and a horse for my little sister.

Then we had dinner, and that's the end of Tuesday.

Hope you enjoyed!

Love,
Glitter Girl