Good evening everyone!

It’s late Tuesday night, and I’m happy to report that all our (or most all) staff arrived safely and are spreading their smiles all over camp. To refresh, our first time staff members and our international staff arrived Sunday night. We do this in order to get them a bit acclimated to camp, and go through some red tape. But pre-camp officially begins at dinner Tuesday night. We had a very productive last two days with our new staff, and earlier today spoke with them about the energy that’s about to jolt our lives! And did it ever! Tonight at dinner (which by the way was a wonderful vegetarian pasta dish served up by our esteemed assistant cook Tim) our numbers went way up, along with the spirit and especially the VOLUME!!! Our new head nurse Casie was taken aback, and even ‘reminisced’ about the quiet last few days we had! Those days are gone! The cheers, the songs, the laughter, all put big smiles on all our faces. After dinner, the girls went to Happy Camper Hall (to be referred to the rest of the summer as HCH) for a game of “Name That Tune”. I don’t know who won because I had to leave all the ‘excitement’ to take care of other business, but truthfully because I didn’t know a single song they were playing. Ever hear of the Beatles??? Oh well…

Later in the evening, I went down to the office to go over the schedule for tomorrow, and my oh my was it lively!!! The new office staff is moving in, and all there old friends and old campers came by to visit, help with the unpacking, etc. There were also a bunch of girls in the office discussing their past year, their ideas/plans for the summer, songs for opening night…you name it! Gosh I love camp!!! Suzi and I had to dismiss us in order to retire to our cabin. Suzi still had a lot of paper work to do, and I wanted to get my thoughts down here. It seems like the only free time I have to write to you is either early morning or late at night. But there is so much going on I feel like by the time I get to writing, I’ve forgotten it all! I’ll keep trying.

Oh yes! One of the really fun things we got to do the last couple days is get all of our new staff down to the ski docks! We introduced them to the most popular of all waterfront activities yesterday…TUBING! I took it easy on our first-timers, don’t worry. I told some of them afterwards how I kept it easy, and they said ‘if that’s easy I hate to see hard!’ Just wait…

Then today we pulled out the skis. It was a bit choppy on Blue Lake this afternoon, so we didn’t have as much success as I would have liked, but a lot gave it the old college try. Some had skied before and did great, and we did get some up for the first time. But when we have such beautiful weather, the waterfront is the place to be, no matter what you’re doing!

So tomorrow is our first full day of pre-camp, and I promise to keep you informed. We are truly now going FULL SPEED AHEAD!!!! Until then…

MP