Pre-Camp

I arrived safely in Vermont after 15 hours of travel - a car ride to London Heathrow, an Airbus to Frankfurt, a Boeing to Boston, and a four hour van ride through Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont to camp. It was an incredibly long journey, but it was made easier by the two girls I met, Rianne (camp name: London) and Kirsty (camp name: Tink) - we quickly became friends and helped each other through the journey and the subsequent crushing despair on our first night. I also met two other English girls a couple of days later, Smiley and Starry, who are also good friends of mine here. My camp name is Pepper. I have since met loads of really nice, friendly people.

The weather here is ridiculously sunny and warm, but it's very humid and prone to storms. Predictably, I'm sunburnt already. As well as the beautiful weather, the food here is amazing - because we're not allowed artificial flavours or colours in England, all the synthetic goodness in America has been great!

Some highlights from pre-camp include:

• Random people in Walmart loving our accents
• Indi teaching us how to make ice cream from scratch
• Swimming in the lake
• Learning how to make friendship bracelets, and loads of camp songs
• Getting good at swiping spiders out of tents
• The staff overnight - we put up tents in a rainstorm, but made an excellent campfire under the unit shelter and cooked a really nice dinner on it. Sunny radioed the office saying, "A tree has fallen down, there's a fire in the unit shelter, and we've lost our Socks." ('socks' has grammatical status as she is in fact one of the other counsellors here). Later, when the rain was worse, Dappy used my phone torch, which has an SOS feature, to flash over to the unit shelter for the rest of the staff to save us. We soon splashed through the swamp that the campsite had become and curled up next to the fire for a while. Unfortunately Sunny got really sick, and we had to be rescued by Cookie in a pick-up truck. That was bizarre - sitting in the back of a pick-up truck in the middle of the night as the rain hammered down, driving up a huge hill with hairpin bends.
• Funfest - We had a few groups of Girl Scouts at camp for the night, and Tink, London and I organised a drama game activity for some of them to sign up to. We got a full class, and the kids were really into it and seemed to really enjoy themselves. We were so pleased with ourselves! Also, I got two gifts from two of the campers and that was a lovely ego boost.
• The staff having a movie night in the Ev (main building at camp). We watched Pitch Perfect and it was fun because we were all sprawled out with snacks and sleeping bags:

• Getting qualified in First Aid and CPR with the American Red Cross. I was so pleased with myself.
• I also became a member of the American Girl Scouts, which is bizarre.

For the next fortnight, I'm going to have a horse-riding program, and two travel programs. I'm pretty excited for it, but nervous. I am going to attempt to do weekly round ups of highlights, but I'm not making any promises as I am a shoddy, shoddy blogger. I'm also documenting funny quotes from people, and I might put them up at some point, if I can make a substantial post out of them. For now though, I'm going to go and be jittery about the girls arriving TOMORROW. Eeeeek!