Girls' Camp and Ticks.

Every year in the summer, the Young Women in the LDS church go camping. It's sort of like Scout Camp, except tamer. There's less...manly stuff. Snipe hunting is still a big thing, but for the most part, there aren't too many pranks (at least not on the one time when I went).

Girls in their 7th and 8th grade years in Utah have the option of not only attending Girls' Camp with their ward in the summer, but attending a second camp called OakCrest. It's a bunch of girls from a bunch of different stakes (ie, church boundaries, not stakes in the ground or steaks) all thrown together to socialize, sing, make fires, cook s'mores, and make boondoggles. All that fun camping bonding stuff.

My awesome cousin Amy is currently working up at OakCrest for the summer. It seems so weird to me that she's old enough to work there, especially since the time I went summer before my 8th grade year, all the camp councilors seemed so old and sophisticated.

From what I could tell, Amy is having a fun time, and I know she'll be a great councilor once the girls start coming up. From the sounds of things, it hasn't changed much from when I was there. There's still a lot of the same activities (archery, zipline, hike) and in theory it sounds like a ton of fun. And, for some people, it really is. I had been hearing the hype about OakCrest from friends in the ward, from friends at school, from EVERYONE.

Amy was back from training today, we were all together for a birthday dinner; and she was telling us all about the experience: The staff, the food, etc. My mom asked me,

"Do you remember much about the food you ate there, when you went? Was it good?"

To which I replied:

"Nope. I sorta blocked that whole trip out of my mind."

My aunt then commented, "I seem to remember you not having the best time when you went."

And I didn't. I am an only child, and I am extremely protective of my mom. She's probably the only person besides Tanner and Sahara who really completely knows me. And at that point, she had recently had a hysterectomy, which scared me more than anything else ever had.

I've always gotten a little homesick; the first few years of Girl Scout camp were ridiculous, Girl's camp with the church wasn't too bad, but OakCrest was miserable. It took me years to stop being homesick. I think the fact that I was mushed in with a bunch of people I didn't know made it worse, but I missed my mom like crazy.

So that was the first contributing factor. The second was, I was deathly afraid of getting a tick.

I don't know why it bothered me so badly. All I knew was, I took every single extra precaution there was available NOT to get a tick. It just sounded so gross, and not only gross, it sounded invasive. I have a distinct memory of someone telling me,

"It'd be about the size of a small watermelon seed, with little wriggling legs. And its head would be under your skin."

Getting a tick was never a threat before. But at OakCrest, for me, getting a tick seemed equivalent to the Zombie Apocalypse. I have no idea why. My imagination has this tendency to take things I'm scared of to the worst possible level, and not let them go until the threat has passed (I once spent a whole summer of my childhood being deathly afraid of zombies because I watched Scooby Doo on Zombie Island. The dumb movie wasn't even that scary; I re-watched it last Halloween with Tanner and I was so surprised how not scary it was. I'm pretty sure my mind made up 90% of the scenes that I remembered and was scared of as a kid.)

I survived the week at camp like a champion wuss. Tick-less, of course, even after spending an entire night sleeping out on a tarp in the middle of a meadow. I did find a spider lurking under my pillow, but that's another story. I shot arrows at a target and did the zipline and most of the things the other girls did, but I was so anxious to go home.

I was so anxious, that by the time I had got home and showered that Saturday, my mom had had to remind me of some wonderful news: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (the book, not the movie) was being released that night at midnight. I was so overjoyed that I promptly took a nap and went to the midnight book release with my mom. So, really, it was a combination of really HATING OakCrest and the pure ecstasy of getting my hands on the next Harry Potter that negated pretty much any memory I have of OakCrest.

Plenty of my friends loved OakCrest. And well they should. I think if circumstances had been different, I would have loved it too.

But that's not the way it worked out. So,

Making Camping Trips better since 2005.

& That's Elementary, dear readers.