The End of a Good Thing

I worked my last day in the screening department at Midtown today. I got a job on the accommodations team at camp for the school year, so I had to quit at Midtown. I'm really excited about the opportunity to work at camp again, but it was hard to leave screening because I have enjoyed working there. The work is interesting and the guys I work with are great; they keep me laughing, but also work hard and do a good job. So, it was a bittersweet day.

The Basin

Joshua and I got up early Sunday and headed out to the basin, which is an area in Nelder Grove with a ton of giant sequoia trees. He had been telling me about it since he went with Ty earlier in the summer, so I was pretty excited.

Josh said he would take care of breakfast, but I didn't know what he had in mind. Imagine my surprise and excitement when we got there and he started a fire and pulled out ingredients for breakfast burritos. Now, for those of you who have never had breakfast burritos, trust me when I say they are absolutely delicious and Josh makes the best breakfast burritos I have ever eaten. 

Prepping the ingredients.

Homemade salsa made by Heather and Michelle.

Starting the potatoes.

Our breakfast spot.

The finished plate of goodness before I devoured the whole thing; that's right, the whole thing.

After breakfast, we headed out to explore the basin and it was beautiful.

There aren't any trails, so you just wander around through the forest surrounded by giant sequoia trees, it's impressive.

What grove of giant sequoias would be complete without the beautiful dogwood trees?

We returned to camp early in the afternoon to pack up our vehicles and head out.

Michelle had asked me to take pictures of the house they will be moving into and Josh decided he should be in all of them (don't worry, he cleaned the sink). After taking care of that, we said goodbye to the Starbucks and each other. I came home to carne asada tacos with more delicious homemade salsa.

Prepare for Purple

Saturday was the last day of summer 2011 at Calvin Crest. I have spent almost every weekend this summer up there volunteering with the Accommodations team, mostly helping with turnover on Saturdays when we clean up the camp from the previous week and prepare for the next group of campers. We had our final turnover day Saturday, then there was a BBQ and we watched the staff video from the summer.

Sam and I working together during turnover.

I had brought up the shirts for our Accommodations team, so after turnover we put them on for the BBQ. It made it so easy to spot the members of our team because the purple shirts stand out.

We had a hard time gathering up our team for a picture because Ben and Janice were busy checking the staff out after they cleaned their rooms, but we finally got everyone in one place.

Ty, Joshua, Janice, Rachel, Ben, Stephanie, me, and Sam

I love this team, it has been a pleasure and an honor to work with them this summer.

Sam and I not only had matching shirts, but matching shorts too! Twins pictures!

 Then we just had some fun with the camera.

Rachel and me. We were roommates my second summer on staff and have been friends since.

I was glad to finally get some pictures of everyone and we had a great time at the BBQ and wearing our shirts, but the last weekend of camp is always hard as people are leaving and you have to say goodbye. Thankfully, more than half of the Accommo team from summer is still going to be there in the fall, so I'm looking forward to working with them again!

The Feed

Jonah's birthday was Saturday, so we celebrated with him Sunday. The plan was to have a crawdad feed, so Sunday afternoon we set out to hunt crawdads. The first creek we went to was too deep still.

 Although they saw a couple, we couldn't catch any.

We went to another creek that had less water, but only found one baby crawdad there. At least the kids had fun playing in the water. We tried one more spot without success and finally decided to have a feed with the rest of the delicious food we already had and no crawdads.

So we did and it was delicious.

I made chocolate coffee ice cream cake for dessert.

First Weekend in August

Here are some photos from my most recent weekend at camp.

Hiking to the meadow Friday morning. It was pretty and soggy.

Hammock time with Rachel under this beautiful tree.

Sam and I working together during turnover Saturday.