Monday, May 30, 2011

Last Night at Camp

The last night of a long weekend at camp goes one of two ways: it's either uneventful because everyone is so beat from eating too much and splitting wood and standing in the sun or it's the greatest night of the weekend and all of us "kids" stay up late and have a blast.

Last night was the latter. The evening started with a wicked thunderstorm. My aunts & uncles were listening to the NASCAR race on the radio when a weather report broke in telling everyone to get to a stable structure. A stable structure is hard to come by at work. We all sleep in tents and campers. But we made due with what we had. The kids that were already in bed were woken up and brought into one of the two campins (a camper with a make-shift cabin built onto it). But us older "kids" decided to tough out the storm.

We stood under an awning and cracked jokes while we cracked open beers. A couple of us watched the storm come in on our smart phones so we knew it wasn't going to be too bad.

The storm passed and we moved from the awning to the amber glow of the bonfire. A friend of a couple of my cousins joined us around the fire. Needless to say, her first visit to camp would be a memorable one. I've mentioned before that we don't have running water at camp. Using the bathroom is tough enough in an outhouse, let alone getting sick.

It's never fun throwing up. It's worse if you have an audience. It's embarrassing. But when you mix cherry rum with Dr. Pepper, and with each drink there's less Dr. Pepper and more cherry rum, getting sick is pretty much inevitable. But at camp we're all family, even if you're not related, and there's plenty of people to hold your hair and rub your back or get you a water.

Just as the seven or eight of us were about to head into our respected tents and campers, another storm hit. One minute it was calm with a slight breeze, the next there was rain coming at us sideways. So suffice it to say we abandoned our plan to go to bed and we had more drinks and told more jokes and listened to more stories as Mother Nature tried to ruin our last night at camp.

A night like that is the sign of a great weekend at camp.
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