First 3 weeks of camp

Hey all. I haven't been able to update this page until now due to the computers at camp being crap and being at the pub most of the time.

Well, the plane rides were all on schedule and were very long. The Air New Zealand long haul service has changed dramatically in the last few years with better seats, entertainment and food, but I still couldn't sleep. I arrived in LA to nice clear skies and warm temps but only spent 8 hrs there before I flew out to NY. I flew into Newark airport in New Jersey and had to wait a couple of hours for my baggage to catch up on a later flight. After a trip on the bus into Manhattan and the Port Authority bus station I had to get to 116th St. I was on 42nd so I thought I might be able to walk it in about an hour. However after walking ten blocks in ten minutes and dripping in sweat in the 35 degree heat I decided to pay for a cab. Anyway, got to my location and caught the bus with about 30 other counselors going to Chipinaw.

About Chipinaw
Camp Chipinaw is actually two summer camps next to each other. The main camp has 8 week campers and the other, Chipinaw @ Silver Lake, has two 4 week sessions for campers. Both camps are split into girls and boys camps and border onto a small lake. The cabins are fairly old and wooden with no insulation and are split into two bunk rooms on either side of a couple of toilets and showers. Each half of a cabin fits between 6 and 12 beds for campers and couselors. For more info on the camp look at the link on my links list.

My first two weeks here were as part of the pre-camp crew. There were 40 of us from NZ, Australia, England, USA and the odd one from Holland and Israel. For the first two weeks we were split into four groups and each group worked on one of the camps. We weed-whacked, painted, mowed lawns, picked up sticks, raked leaves, waterblastered and other general maintenance of the grounds and the cabins. Some of the cabins were in pretty bad shape. One weird thing I found was the each nationality has a different word for a weedeater. The Aussies call it a whipper-snipper, the kiwis a weed eater, the poms a strimmer and the americans a weed whacker. There's also a couple of other items that are all called different things such as jandals and waterblasters.

After our first day which was about 35 degrees, the weather turned bad, with a lot of rain and the temperature dropping to between 5 and 10 degrees. The grounds got saturated with mud everywhere and my feet were a mess from wearing wet socks all day, every day. After the first two weeks of pre-camp, the weather started to pick up again with nice days in the mid 20s just as some of the new staff arrived. Since then we've had warm temperatures and a few nice days but it still rains quite a bit. It has been sunny enough that I have a tan. The sun up here is a lot weaker than back home. You can spend a good two to three hours in the sun before you start getting burnt bad. The heat is there but it doesn't have the intensity. My feet have started to get better now my shoes are dry again and I can also wear jandals again. I was getting blisters on blisters and had to nearly hobble for a couple of days.

Over the last ten days all the rest of the staff have been coming into camp so now we have over 200 counsellors plus about 100 other staff here so learning names has been hard.

We've had three days off while we've been here. On the first ne it rained all day so we went to Wal-Mart and then the pub, the next we drove for an hour and a half to a mall and on our last day off we went to a local lake and had drinks and a BBQ.

Not much more I can think of at the mo but will now try to keep this updated.