Journal Topic #4

Girls Camp:

In my church, starting at the age of 13??? Maybe 12... I don't remember... Girls are allowed to attend "Girls Camp" (GC) once a year. I think I went for 4 years. I went to GC in both California and Texas.

The great thing about GC in Cali is the weather. You get to camp in the mountains. It's cool in the morning and bit warmer during the day, but still brisk. The scenery is gorgeous, the fresh mountain air is intoxicating. We would hike, do survival training, scavenger survival runs, repelling off a large wall, swimming. It was always fun, with a few moments of "this sucks" when you'd fight with a friend or any girl drama really. In Cali we mostly made our own food at each site, everyone would get a turn at the chores... I think for the day you hiked they would make a sack lunch for us. In Cali they would mix up girls from different wards to camp out together, forcing us to get to know other people. Which was nice but a bit nerve racking for me. We would have older girls who were the counselors be in charge of our site and girls. The camp would have a theme and the counselor would come up with a name for our group and make us special things like matching bandanas or t-shirts to identify our group. We sang songs around the camp fire, hiked up to a huge tour only once to do star gazing, sing, and talk about the amazing universe God created. The last night of camp we sat around a large camp fire and bore our testimonies of our love for the Savior Jesus Christ and what our GC experience taught us about that love. This lasted for sooo many hours, that in years to come they changed it to having a camp fire with just your group of girls to share testimonies and experiences.

Texas GC was a bit of a shock for me. We camped in Louisiana. It was an extremely flat area, not that pretty, and excruciatingly hot and humid... not to mention the mosquitoes, ticks and chiggers (I had never even heard of chiggers until this point in my life). We stayed with our wards so we didn't really get to know the other girls. They made all our food for us, each ward had to take turns cleaning the mess hall. Activities for the day were fun enough. We had skeet shooting, target shooting (Texas and their guns, lol), canoeing, crafts, and swimming. Well that's all I remember anyway. I think mostly I sat around feeling hot. I really did not enjoy Texas GC. When I got older I got to help out with the crafts one year. They gave me shrinky dink paper and toaster ovens for the girls and I created shrinky dink charms. I had a very popular craft area. Luckily the craft leaders got to sleep in the craft cabin which had A/C.

Now a days they have a sort of obstacle course... forget what they call it. With lots of wall climbing, repelling, and all sorts of challenges. I should note that girls who've lived in Texas a while, generally don't have an issue with the heat and humidity.

Here is a blurry picture of me my first GC in Texas. That's me skeet shooting. I was terrible... couldn't see the skeet to save my life. I was much better at Target practice.