Summer Camp Round Two

That feeling you get when you return to a place you fell in love with is unforgettable and difficult to put into words.  I simply loved summer camp in the summer of 2012 I decided it was an opportunity for round two! SB2W summer of 2013 would be my second and last time I was a camper.  The picture to the left depicts the cabin I was in, I was still a Legend in Cabin 12 but our group was a little different this time.  My best friend didn't have the opportunity to come, but I found my old friends and new ones.

We had a lot of pride in our cabin and my counselors where the coolest of them all.  I still have the opportunity to email back and for with one of them as I go through my college years.  To the right is both of my counselors for my cabin  the one on the left eventually was added to the roman team "the enemy" and the one to the right was a Galatian so she was on the right team. 

I still struggled with wrist issues on this trip and had to keep myself in line with some of the activities.  During the faith pole i luckily was able to get on top of the telephone pole and jump with a little help from some of my friends.  Heights remained to not be enjoyable and when the high ropes corse adventure came around I found myself cheering from the ground...safe!  I returned to the white water rafting adventure and survived for a second time.  The weather seemed to be against us as it poured most of the afternoon and night meaning we got a little wet while camping.

I kept many of my friends from this adventure but I knew all to well that I would not return to the wonderful Que, so I said my goodbyes and prayed that maybe there was a chance I could return.  The outdoors has always brought me a sense of piece and when the two weeks came I didn't want to leave.  My brothers came with on this adventure though I rarely saw them.  Unfortunately for them the weather most of that summer was rainy and kept us inside for some of the day.  They found this boring and I got the chance to grow closer with my cabin mates and counselors.  This term also turned out to be a blue summer and the cool blue Galatians went home with another victory over the red hot Romans.

Life Lesson #22: Sometimes the weather can ruin your adventure, but you must improvise and turn it into becoming something much better and never let the weather ruin your fun.

Track Team Over Night

When they say that you run your fastest while in a hotel hallway, many people don't realize how truthful that is.  Overnight school trips are amazing and are a great opportunity, but sports overnight trips are even better.  During Track season the biggest meet for us during the regular season was ACSI in Bangor, PA.  This was May of 2013 and the first time we stayed overnight.  previous years we enjoyed torturing ourselves and decided it would be way more fun to meet at school at 4 am and drive to the meet.  This messed up our sleep schedules and hurdlers went first and I was barely awake.


Between athletes there is such a saying as "I run faster in the hotel hallways then I do anywhere else"  is probably the most realistic and truthful statement about athletes I know.  We went around the town and just admired the smallness of it all.  It was the cutest center to a town I had seen in awhile.

The food that we had for dinner was your usually carb load up, the classics like pasta.  We were a small team at this point with no that many girls and we were able to place 3rd over all.  I wasn't able to achieve my goal of getting first place for my number 1 event and all time favorite the 100m hurdles.  I knew I was coming back the next year to face the same girls and I wasn't going to lose to them again.  We placed 2nd for the 4 by 100m relay and it was the best time for the year and we were happy about that.

The trip was an adventure and the track meet took all day and my whole team waited till I finish javelin and then we headed to the nearest sonic for our classic post meet dinner.  That day each of us accomplished somethings that we never though where possible.  But that day we might have run faster on the track then through the hotel hallways no matter how creepy they were.

Life Lesson #21: There might be people out there that are faster and stronger, but as long as you push yourself to do your best then you can't walk away with your head low.

Mexico Round Two

After this first year of crushing disappointment, it only seems fit that we were again to return to Mexico in and unfortunate turn on circumstances.  Originally the plan was to go to Panama in August 2012.  A month or two prior to the trip our youth pastor got a job on the other side of the country in California.  And he was scheduled to start work before our trip.  By now I had learned to live on my toes and expect the unexpected when it comes to ministry.


None of the other pastors on staff had the availability to go with us to Panama and the youth pastor taking over had no experience down there.  So in drastic measures we quickly switch the trip to Mexico for a second year in a row.


The route was the same as the summer prior, we flew into California and drove down into Mexico.  This trip though was much more child oriented.  We did help with some construction projects but nothing as demanding as the year prior. But this trip was still a blessing.

Since my youth pastor was already moved into his house we went to visit him at the college he still works at.  This campus is in Marietta, California and has natural hot springs.  The smell wasn't particularly that appealing but the warmth quickly changed our minds. We got to experience college life and eat some great food that only the west coast offers us.


I learned that making balloon animals is way harder than it looks and takes a skill of some sort to make them awesome.  We sang some of our spanish worship songs that I learned in my spanish class.  The kids couldn't get enough of them.  At the orphanage that we spent decent amount of time at one of the workers daughters was fluent in english.  She served as our translator with many of the little children.

One day we spent with some local people from a village I spent the day with a brother and sister who never said a word to anyone.  When their mother came to get then she smiled at me and took her kids.  She pointed at a piece of paper that said thank you written on it with the children's ages; 4 and 5.  I never figured out their names or their mothers for that matter.  Maybe they all couldn't talk or they were silenced.

We spent some time at the beach doing devotions and just getting to know each other through the missions trip.  At first I was really upset about the fact that I didn't have the opportunity to go to Panama, but as the bible says when the Lord closes a door he opens a window.  This was one of the first times I started to open up about my spiritual journey.  I made a few friends cry while I told my story but in the end it was all worth it.

Life Lesson #20: Sharing my testimony the first time was hard, but it only got easier with experience.

1st Summer Camp

Going to a summer camp for the first time that is six hours away from home brought some nerves.  It was a sleep away christian sports camp for two weeks. Summer of 2012 I went off to Summer's Best Two Weeks with my best friend.  With intense competition between the Cool Blue Galatians and the Red Hot Romans, the octatholon, swim meet, track meet, canoe meet, overnight trips, and dinning hall singing.

Immediately I loved the entire camp atmosphere and my cabin.  I was with my best friend and six others girls my age and two consolers that where in college.  I quickly made friends with girls of all ages.  As someone who eats constantly it was hard to adjust to the rule of no food in the cabins.  We also weren't allowed to have any electronics, but for me that wasn't a major issue.

I enjoyed every moment of camp and as the weeks passed I didn't want to leave.  The Galatians ended up winning camp for the term and it was a great victory for us.  My best friend was put on the Romans and I was a Galatian.  I helped the soccer team win and I received first place in all my events in the track meet.  The canoe meet wasn't in my favor when in the doubles my partner and I flipped our canoe and it started to sink into the lake.

This camp pushed me to the limit and I spent a lot of time with God.  I went white water rafting as the Legend trip.  which the legends where Cabin 11 and 12 for the boys and girls, which in camp is the oldest group and why we go on an overnight trip.  It was a lot of fun and we named our raft the Titanic 2.0 and ironically we were the only raft not to flip over or have anyone fall out.  In the end I had such a great time that I decided to go back again the next summer.

Life Lesson #19: The more time I spend away from home the more I can be myself and forget what really goes on.

Girl Scouts Take D.C.

Celebrating 100 years of girl scouts at the capital means that there will be a lot of other girls around, like thousands.  We had the honor of having one of group members win a contest for creating and original song that she got to perform for everyone.  It was a girl scout cookie rap that we helped her right while trying to sell girl scout cookies.  It's easy for the little girls to sell things to people because they are all cute, we instead had to use our talents and impress our costumers.


On our trip we not only got to celebrate what girl scouts has done over the years we get to visit all of the monuments that celebrate America's history.  The Washington monument was closed at the time so we could only admire it from a distance.  We weren't allowed to visit the president inside his very large house so we instead took a picture and attempted to count all the security guards around and on top of the building.  I was the only one able to spot the snippers, who are supposed to be known for their stealth and ability to go unnoticed.

At the end of our trip we took one of those hilarious ghost tours.  I don't know about my readers, but I personally do not believe in ghosts but the writer side of me thoroughly enjoyed the creativity of the people who made up some of the stories.  My friends though were not so convinced that they were not real.  This made is easy for me to scare them for the rest of the night, which I took full advantage of.  Even though this was my third trip to Washington D.C. I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to meet other girls scouts from all over the world.

Life Lesson #18: When girl scouts take over a city, it will always be left cleaner when we leave than before we got there.

Touring a City in One Day: Philadelphia

It is quit interesting that I haven't yet alluded to the amount of times I have been to Philadelphia. By this time sophomore year of high school I had already been about 14 times, and that was just to the museum/historical areas.  I wasn't all to excited for this field trip because I had already seen everything we were going to see many times over. We also went with the freshman class which we didn't entirely like and thought they would ruin the whole trip.

This trip I then decided to make it more interesting and recall all the facts in which I had learned over the years and pretended to be a tour guid for a group of my friends.  They thoroughly enjoyed the show I put on.  We laughed when a family joined the group because they thought it was their tour, I think they were very embarrassed.  

It was a day well spent and we saw all the classic stops and got our pick of some good cheese steaks.  The class below us wasn't to much of a problem and most of them were civil the whole trip.  I enjoyed the difference of going with my friends and not different people in my family.  Against my teachers wishes it became more of a social field trip instead of an educational one, but it was still a day off from school.

Life Lesson #17: Never pretend to be a tour guide otherwise you will get people listening in on your explanation for free.

Replacement Missions Trip

When you are called at one in the morning and are told that your missions trip to Nicaragua is cancelled the day you are going to leave, you are probably really mad.  I know I was!  I was a few hours from getting on a plane and our trip was cancelled because of an airline issue.  But as God would have it Mexico in August 2011 was the replacement trip. 

It was a few weeks later into the middle of August and we got on a plane and flew over to California.  But our journey was not finished, we then got white fifteen passages vanes and drove six hours down into Mexico.  We went to a little town in the Baja California Peninsula.

This size hour drive was perhaps the scariest ride of my life.  We are driving through the mountains on a two narrow lane road with a guard rail for only half the trip.  Most of the cars that passed on the other side were primarily semi-trucks. Music was the only thing that kept everyone calm and until the song by Carrie Underwood Jesus take the Wheel came on.  


My youth pastor was driving and as this song came on he started singing loudly and every time the words 'Jesus take the wheel' came on he let go of the steering wheel.  The roads were curvy and all of us started to scream.  My friend sitting in the passenger seat a few months into having her license grabbed the wheel to steady the van.  I quickly changed the song to something else and my youth pastor continued to sing the lyrics but replacing 'Jesus take the wheel' with 'Jesus take Camille' which was the name of one of the girls in our van.

The entire trip down took extremely long but we made it into Mexico and made it to the valley in which we stayed for the whole trip.  Up to this point for me all the missions trips I have been on have been children focused, this trip was different.  We brought the extra money we raised and used it to build a house for someone.  This first step was to get the equipment needed. After we did that then we split up into three different groups to go to three different places each day.

This is the house we built

For the first day my group went to a place called the dome.  There we built the chairs, benches, and beds that were going into this house.  It was a long day with a lot of hammering and soar hands.  We were kindly given food from the neighbors that lived in the section where the dome was.  One of the houses was the pastors family of the church there as well and the other building was an orphanage.  We played with the kids for only a few minutes, but they loved every minute of it and it was a great distraction for us.  Our hands were red and our arms were weak but we kept on cutting the wood and building the furniture.

The second day my team went to the building sight and we had two purposes that day.  The group that was their before us had put up the frame to the the house.  Our job was to paint the sides blue, put up the shingles on the roof, nail in the drainage system when it rains, and to dig the hole for the outhouse.  We knew it was going to be a long day a head of us but we wanted to work hard and we wanted to make the best of what we were given.

As a person who is afraid of heights I decided  to work on the roof and it was scary but very entertaining.  We started off painting the sides blue, which means that we got blue paint on us.  They once we got one side painted we let others take over and started working on the roof.  We put down the tar and started placing the shingles.  After we were all finished we started nailing in the metal storm drainage which after a hard day of nailing wood together the day before to much more effort than we all thought.  Once that was finished we were covered in blue paint and black tar.  

Most of the guys had spent the day digging the the hole an they were getting to a point in which they couldn't fit in the hole to dig.  I then volunteered my small frame to start digging until it was deep enough that we could put the outhouse that one that the other groups had built.  The hole was so deep that I wasn't able to get myself out of the hole.  Instead two of my guy friends had to grab me by the arms to pull me out.  We arrived back to base later than we were supposed to and went straight to dinner.  Most of the group was covered in blue paint, but the exception was three people (myself included).  We were covered in blue paint, tar, and dirt.  As we tried to wash it all off after dinner we seemed to be very unsuccessful.  We attempted to use gasoline to try to scrub some of it off, it only worked a little bit.

On the third day we went to the house that the pastor of the church in which we came down to help.  The house was in the process of being built and their family was filled with almost 20 kids so it was a few stories high.  They needed to add another floor so the best option was to create a basement.  This day we then spent the whole day digging in the dirt to start to create the basement.  It was three straight days of working hard and the reward was great.  We built a house and added some electricity for a family in the church, built all the furniture for it, and dug out majority of a future basement.  It was hard but all of it was used by God to reach people, a nice addition is I can say I have built a house!

Life Lesson #16: Working with you hands for three days straight in the hot sun will be hard, but enduring through it means that God will use you for a much grater purpose and saving a life instead of just giving them a home. 

Plane Ride Alone

The greatest moment in a child's life is when they start to do things on their own without their parents.  In July of 2011 and hour before I was to leave to go on my third missions trip to Nicaragua our plane was cancelled.  Trying to get forty people on the same plane within a few days of our trip was simply impossible.  I was already packed and excited to get out of the house.  I decided that I still needed to take a vacation and visit my extended family back home in Minnesota.  

I called up my dad as soon as I thought of this great plan.  I had convinced him to look at how many miles we had and the trip would cost us nearly nothing.  I was dropped off at the airport a few days later and my dad went with me as far as he could.  It was a nerve racking experience and I slowly forced myself to calm down.  I had been in this airport so many times and this was nothing new, except for the part of being alone, but that can be fun if you let it.  I got through security fairly quickly which I was thankful for and I went to find my terminal.

As I reached my terminal I sat down and sighed a sense of relief.  I loved flying and that wasn't the part I was terrified about it was the fact that I had to maneuver through the airport by myself and making sure I did not forget my suitcase.  The flight was pleasant and I sat next to some very nice people.  I made sure I didn't forget my suitcase before I got off the plane.  I didn't check my bag because it was ultimately cheaper and my grandma bought me the liquids I would need  for the week.

My cousins picked me up at the airport and the fun started right away, we drove a few hours up to my grandmothers house and I was so excited to see her and the rest of my cousins.  We spent that next weekend out on the lake doing all the things that we loved to do on the water.  My uncle tried to knock me off of the Sedoo, but I held on like there was no tomorrow.  I got to spend a lot of time with my cousins on both sides of my family and it was a well spent week.  I got to have some great midwestern and Norwegian food that I grew up on.

Life lesson #15: Uncles are meant to have fun with you and try to knock you off of whatever you are riding on the lake, but you must fight back because sometimes you just might knock them off.