Well, a lot has happened since I last posted. We have been down to camp twice, on Labor Day weekend (September 2-5) and another weekend (September 30-October 2).
I'll start with the first trip down.
Friday/Saturday
I had a soccer tournament in Taos this weekend. We had one game on September 2 (Friday), which we won, and we lost early the next morning. At this point, I knew my team was not going to make it into the championship game, so I left with my dad to drive down to Santa Fe, where my mom and Menchie (our foreign exchange student) were watching my brother's soccer tournament. My truck was all packed with arts and craft supplies donated by (first names only for privacy reasons) Suzanne and DJ. I had also written to several businesses (Target, Hobby Lobby, Michaels and Wal-Mart) asking for donations, but to no avail.
Menchie was an honorary Girl Scout, so I took her with me and we headed south towards camp. We stopped in Socorro and got Mountain Dew and some new sunglasses for Menchie before continuing on again. It rained. And then the sun came out and we baked for a while. And then it started to rain again. We drove through some strange weather for about 7 hours, with 3.5 gas tank fill-ups, 3 Mountain Dews and 1 set of directions (supplemented by a lovely invention called a GPS) before finally reaching camp. The rest of the troop had gone down on Friday, so we were already a day late but were happily received and ate dinner before going to bed.
Sunday
We woke up early on Sunday and went down to the lodge to have breakfast. Lots of CMW former campers were there to help us work, so we slept in the cabins up the valley. Our cabin sustained damage from a frightening wind storm that restored it to its original state from the old CMW days. Surprisingly, only the front of the cabin was affected.
It was freezing cold. We had only ever been up at camp in the summer before, so this fall weather was new to us. Needless to say, we huddled around the fire in the lodge and tried to thaw out. I started talking with everyone that had been working on the Arts and Crafts Center the day before, and found out that Joker and Phantom had spent all of the previous day cleaning dead animals, live animals, animal excrement, dust, dirt, unidentifiable objects and general debris out of the building. It was so bad that protective masks were needed! A few of us went up after breakfast to work on the building. Joker and Phantom repaired holes in the walls and floor and tried to seal up the building better while I started to organize some of the art supplies that I had collected into neatly labelled plastic storage containers. Due to the amazing generosity of Suzanne and DJ, this took almost all day. After lunch, members of my troop helped me sort through old art supplies left in CMW storage. A lot was unusable and had to be thrown away, but a good portion of it was in good condition and was carried up to the building to be sorted and packed.
Sunday
We were going to hike up to Halfway to Heaven this morning, but didn't get to it. We ended up eating breakfast, putting some finishing touches on each of our projects (which mostly involved storing art supplies and sealing up the building for me), and heading up to Halfway to Heaven to take goofy pictures and sigh about having to leave.
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| It's probably closer to heaven than halfway, but the name's just too catchy to let go of. |
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