Growing up, my only reference of summer camps were mostly movies and television. The Parent Trap starring Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills as two long-lost identical twins, respectively, made summer camp appear to be an incredible, regimented, and luxurious experience. Later on, The Parent Trap starring Lindsay Lohan and Lindsay Lohan as a different set of even longer-lost twins (in the later version, the mother lives all the way in London rather than just in Boston) made camp look even more luxurious.
I went to summer camp for the first time when I was 14. I was just entering the youth group at Calvary Fellowship, and I was getting shipped off to a camp so that I could assimilate well.
This camp was different than the camps in either version of The Parent Trap. This camp was in an entirely different country—Canada.
Whistler, Canada, to be exact. It was the 24-5 Spiritual Workshop. It was awesome. We got T-shirts and everything—I still remember what they looked like, and I still wish I had mine. The main theme of this first 24-5 that I attended had something to do with inflatable flamingos. We had to collect them. The youth leaders hid them all over the then pre-olympic Whistler / Blackcomb village, and we were divided into teams, and whichever team collected the most inflatable flamingoes won the fame and glory. Legendarily on that trip someone was accidentally stabbed with a pocket knife over an inflated flamingo, but I think the stories about that are greatly exaggerated.
We also stayed in a Marriot, which was 100% awesome. I don’t think I had ever stayed at a hotel without my parents before that first 24-5. It definitely wasn’t the classic summer camp experience I’d come to build up in my mind thanks to Hollywood.
I was pretty skeptical about how enjoyable this church camp could possibly be because I was a sort of shy, skulking, uncool kid and I didn’t think I’d fit in well with this vibrant group of teenagers who actually seemed interested in life and their youth group. But I found that to my surprise, I did make some really great friends there, and I did start to actively want to find inflatable flamingos and guard them with my life (because for some reason, it was okay to steal flamingos from one another so the boys kept scaling the outside balconies of the hotel rooms and sneaking in to other rooms to steal flamingos…)
Summer camp is a classic coming-of-age ritual, I suppose. I went to 24-5 for many years, and after I graduated I became a leader / counselor and experienced the whole thing from a completely new angle and learned the kind of stress we put our leaders through when we snuck around or engaged in shenanigans.
It’s usually nothing like The Parent Trap, though. Also, why would those parents split up their twin daughters and not even tell them about each other?? That’s so deeply messed up. Shouldn’t be allowed.
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