Volley Balls & Team Name Calls

July 28 2008
-Monday-



I can't possibly begin to describe how completely and totally excited I was for the 28th of July. I had every thing ready...my bags packed, cameras ready to go (yeah, all three of them! haha), and I was so very hyper with the anticipation of the week to come.

At last the glorious morning of the 28th arrived...and I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, as some people would say. I had two alarm clocks set- one on my watch and the other on my clock radio, and guess what? Neither of them went! I woke up to the sun coming in my window and the numbers 5:30 AM on my clock. Needless to say that sent my flying out of bed in seconds! My original intent was to be out of bed by 5:00 so that I had time to eat & shower before I left to meet my ride. Lucky for me, I had leftover frozen yogurt from dinner at Costco two nights before, so once showered, I threw my luggage in the car and snatched my cold breakfast out of the freezer to eat on the way. Good thing I don't get car sick!

After a 5 minute drive to downtown Clarkston, mom hugged me and bid me adieu and I was on my way with Laurel to Pullman to meet up with Ruben! The 45 minute drive was rather fun since we talked the whole entire way...or as much as we could in between my mouthfuls of frozen yogurt (which by this point was becoming more of a weird chocolaty-vanilla-y soup stuff).
Once at the Harris's place, I was enthusiastically greeted by my favorite 7 year old...Emily!! Yes, I can never forget the adorable oldest daughter of Ruben Harris. We hung out there for a bit more than half an hour. While I was there I got a wonderful surprise- Lindy & Lucy Butler showed up! I was totally not expecting that, and what made it better was that they ended up riding to camp with us. What fun! Before setting out on the road, we all stood in the Harris's front yard and sang Happy Birthday to Lucy, who had just on that day turned 19. Going to Camp Hope, what a great thing to do to celebrate a birthday!

Not including the 45 minute drive to Pullman, it was a 6 hour road trip to camp. For a good share of it, it was really pretty quiet, since everyone was rather tired from getting up early. My travel mates were Laurel, Lindy, Lucy, Mr. & Mrs. Buzby, and Ruben had the wheel. Considering how long the drive really was, it went by incredibly fast, to tell the truth. We had a lot of fun... dancing in our seats (or as much as you could when you're strapped into the vehicle) to the tune of the Gummy Bear song, posing in the sunlit spotlight of the stone coliseum when we made a side stop at the Grand Coolie Dam’s view point, and looking at all the hundreds of photos on Lucy’s laptop...oh, and of course the snack stop near Spokane. It’s always a joy running through a grocery store with friends grabbing off the shelves whatever sounds good at the moment to eat. After that stop we returned to the car with two boxes of Ritz Bitz, a can of sour cream & onion Pringles, a Pepsi, a Mountain Dew, two sandwiches (or “sammiches” as Lucy got us calling them), and a few other things of which I can’t recall.

Hours later we appeared to have time-warped back to the old Wild West ages as we rode into the little touristy town of Winthrop. We were all very happy to be there, for that meant only a very short while until we reached the camp. Just a few miles later, oh joy of all joys! It was 2:00 and we made it! The very first person we came across was Pastor Steve Harris who informed us where we would be sleeping. At first I was a little disappointed to hear that I wasn’t upstairs again like last year, but I soon got over it when I learned who my cabin mates would be- Joy, Abby, Raeshelle, Beth, Michaela, Jessica, Elizabeth, Carolyn, and two new girls of whom I didn’t know, Susie and Ellen.

I dumped my stuff off in the cabin, claimed an upper bunk, and rushed off to the volleyball court where the funnest game of volley ball of the entire week was currently taking place. It was girls against guys and the girls were dying...to make things more fair the guys decided not to use their hands. That was quite amusing! Haha. Lots of kicking and head-butting the ball was going on on there side of the net! Eventually nobody even cared what the rules to the game were, just so long as the ball got to the other side of the net. By the end of it all we were throwing it and kicking it under the net and everything else! Oh how happy a time... being crazy with friends whom you’ve not seen in a year. Such a joyfully fun reunion!

Not too long after that we were all called down to the little chapel for introductions. After the "Alexander incident" of last year, they changed how the intro's were done so that there wasn't much chance of me messing up yet another camper's name. Ok, ok, so that might not have been why Ruben changed how we did it, but hey, you never know! Haha, but man, I'm still laughing at myself for introducing Zak as Alexander last year...by far the most embarrassing moment of my life, yet had I a chance to go back in time and do it over again I wouldn’t change it for anything. Anyway, this year in the intro’s we had to write our names and other details about ourselves on 3x5 cards and throw them into a pile. Then we would all take turns drawing out a card and introducing the person on it by using those details...no memorization required! How nice.

That evening after chapel, we had Fun 'n Stuff and we got to come up with our team names. Yet again it turned out I came up with my team's name...Cool! The Camp Hope cabin-team names are as follows:

Younger Teen Girls- The CIA (Campers In Action)

Younger Teen Guys- The Undecideds (they couldn't agree on a team name, apparently...though I heard that Power Rangers & The Magical Pink Unicorns were a few of their suggestions)

Older Teen Girls- Shooting Stars

Older Teen Guys- The Storm Troopers

Once everyone had decided upon their team names, we were off on the whirlwind adventure of the first game of the first night! Like last year, it was a scavenger hunt through our luggage where we had to find something for every letter of the alphabet. It was played out slightly different than last years though... Last year when we got all our stuff we had to go on stage and advertise it and the winners were determined upon who had the best stuff and who did the best advertising of their items. This year the winners were picked by who could find each thing in their bag the fastest and by how good the item was. I asked Ruben why he changed it...he laughed and said "Well your team would have an unfair advantage if they had you as an advertiser again!"

I don't remember for sure of everyone's places, but I'm thinking that in the end the Shooting Stars won, followed by the CIA, Undecideds, and the Storm Troopers.

After Fun 'n Stuff we all put our things back into the cabins and headed off for snack time. That was (as was always) a great time. We ate ice cream, cookies, and grapes and weren't required to sit with our cabin group like we are at normal meals, which is cool. Joy and I grabbed a couple seats and sat across from Zak, Bo, and Nick. It was funny to think that these people had identities outside of the internet... All year all I had really known them as were just words on a computer screen. It was absolutely awesome to get to see them in real life! Joy was totally fun, Zak was undoubtedly the most hilarious person in the entire camp, and Bo is always nice to get to talk to. As for Nick, I never really talked to him at all until this year, but now he at least knows my name isn’t Pippin. LOL!

By the time the day was over, I was plenty tired out but didn’t end up getting to sleep until after 12:30 that night. We stayed up and talked for a while and then after lights out we were kept awake for a bit longer because the Shooting Stars were still shooting about the upper portion of the cabin with the lights on and making some racket moving around chairs for some odd reason. It was more than once I saw Elizabeth reach up to bang on the ceiling and tell them to try and let us go to sleep! Oh well. We did all eventually drop off into our dreams for the night though.



“Basically it’s only out of bounds if the volleyball goes outside of this continent.”