One Week Later...

What a week! We have just returned from our time at the Lake Johnson Junior camp and it was wonderful! John and I were both “tent leaders” and we really enjoyed our time! I had three campers and a co-leader in my tent and John had 6 boys in his tent on his own. It was a classic case of more girl leaders than boy leaders. The camp is situated on a sheep farm just north of Queenstown (which is the New Zealand version of the town Banff), which borders a small lake called… you guessed it…Lake Johnson. The area that we camped on was littered with little sheep droppings, which did smell sometimes, and we had the occasional sheep wander through. The campers slept in canvas tents (similar to the ones Peace Country Pioneer uses at the base camp) and there were two small shed type buildings, one which was the “cookhouse” and the other was used as storage. We had “long drop” washroom facilities as they call outhouses here and a large “marquee” style tent that served as the dining/everything room. There were 30 campers or so all together and we had a variety of activities including kayaking, hiking, bouldering (rock climbing without ropes to a restricted height) and gold panning. We had four teams that rotated through these and we drove the kids to a local tourist town which originally was a gold rush town called Arrowtown and did our own panning there. A few of the groups thought they found some gold but my group took our findings to the gold shop where we were told we found “fools gold”.
One of the days/nights we did a camp out at another local lake. The boys went one night and the girls went the next and the day between this we did a 3-4 hour hike through some local trails. I was glad that we waited until the 2nd half of the week to do that long hike because it’s been a while since I’ve done a lot of physical activity and man was I sore. The pain slowly passed as we continued to play lots of camp type wide games and lots of short walks here and there (short being 1-2 hours or so). On the last full day of camp we did an outing with the kids and took them to town where we did a short treasure hunt type game through town (that I got to plan with another girl) and then we took them luge-ing. It was really fun and the kids loved it. Over all the camp was a great experience and it was good to be involved in yet another camp, just to add another experience under our belts and to see how they do camping here. I really enjoyed the size of the camp and how I could get to know the whole staff team and I did manage to learn all the girls names and half the boys names. I had an awesome tent of girls. We had a lot of fun (the 5 of us) Vanessa and Emily were from the same town and knew each other before camp and Christine was from Germany and her mom and her brother are in New Zealand for several months to have a cultural experience and learn English. That was a bit of a challenge as we had to work at understanding each other but for the most part it was really fun! Emily was our resident gymnist who faithfully did her “gym conditioning” almost every day while the rest of the kids had free time. Many of the girls enjoyed watching her do all kinds of bendy things with her body and some really cool things like handstands and flips. Vanessa was my little talker and kept the tent lively when she was around. We had many a giggle together. Rachel my co leader and I had lots of fun getting to know each other and Rachel found it very entertaining to “learn” my Canadian accent. I did instruct the whole tent to call their “woolen hats” toques but I had to give in and use all kinds of kiwi words in order to be understood. For example it’s tea instead of supper and supper instead of bedtime snack. I got some funny looks when I got that confused. My favorite part of camp believe it or not was leading the campfire silly song sessions. I taught the campers all kinds of fun songs, some they already knew and some were brand new. We had ‘heaps’ of fun! Well that’s all from me, here’s John’s rendition of the week.


Well I have to say that I had a very good time getting to know everyone, sharing ideas and leaning new songs and games. I also have to say I make a pretty poor rugby player. But I can’t say they didn’t try to teach me. It was a beautiful little spot for a camp. I really wasn’t sure what I would be able to help with as far as activities went, so I just winged it. I took two groups tramping around the lake, that was an adventure in itself since it was quiet cliffy around one side of the lake and it was hard to tell which way to go so I ended up running ahead a few times to scout it out. We made it back and the next day went much better. The next day went with my team gold panning. A few tried it out but they got bored pretty quick, and what do you do with a bunch of bored kids at a little rocky stream? Build dams! The next day I drove a team to the spot were they were doing bouldering which was just that, giant boulders in a field at the base of the Remarkables mountain range. My forearms were dead after doing it a few times. Quiet times and study times went better than I could ever have hoped. My boys decided they wanted to read different parts of the bible and ask questions about it. I did my best but they didn’t make it easy. One of the boys wanted to read revelations so we started at the beginning and read the letters to the churches, which was cool. I had a great time at the camp, and hopefully we’ll be able to do more sometime. Next, our plan is to try and find some sort of work. We’ve had a lot of fun but it’s time to pay some bills. So hopefully something will come up soon. We’ve had a few people mention fruit picking so maybe we’ll try that… we’ll see?