This is my summer camp page! Ok, so most of you won't know who these people are - or at least, won't know them very well. I don't really care. Some of these pictures are frickin HILARIOUS, and I kinda want to tell you about these people, because... well, they seem completely insane and total pervs, but they can be nice!...occasionally. So anyways.
I took over 200 pictures. This is 30 of them. I LOVE my camera! Be glad I'm too lazy to put up all 200... unless you want to see all 200... but moving on!
Doe River Gorge, 2006!
P.S. This is a Christian camp in a secluded valley in Tennesse. It takes about nine hours to get there, and we spend six days there, doing extreme sports kind of stuff. It's very fun.
This is my whole group. When I say "group", that means we slept in a cabin together, ate meals together, did all our activites together, learned about God together, worshiped together, etc. From left to right, it's Megan Hedger, Kate Barford, Ali Macia, Jenna [I dunno her last name, she was our counselor], me, Pam Malantis, Hilary Taber, and Caroline is on the ground [whose last name I also do not know. She's Ali's friend.] Aren't we gorgeous?
These are our counselors, Jenna and Derrick. Each girl group gets paired up with a guy group. Jenna was our counselor, and Derrick was the counselor of our guys group. At this point, Jenna is trying to be gangsta. It's not really working... lol. But we love her anyhow.
This is Neal and Ali. Neal is going into eighth grade this year, is shorter than I am [which is saying something, lol], and is either a total sweetheart who likes to make people laugh, or a total perv who acts like a sweetheart to get girls.
For instance - you know those basketball pants that button up the sides, ALL THE WAY, so you can just rip them off? He was talking to a group of high school girls wearing those, and they go "Why are you wearing those pants?" and he goes "Easy access."
And then Brian ran up, ripped them open, and ran away again, but that's a different story.
He also can't smile in pictures. Ever. At all. But he's still a great kid.
Aww, look, Kate and Ali are all suited up for mountain-boarding! What is mountain-boarding, you may ask? Well, it's a mix between snowboarding and skateboarding with enormous wheels, except you're on grassy hills. What does it look like?
That's mountain-boarding. That's Ali on the board, by the way. I take a lot of pictures of her, don't I? Oh well. I can't help it if she's cuba-licious!
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Pammy's being awesome, Megan's being gangsta, Ali's being lovey-dovey, and Kate just looks grossed out. She says the sun was in her eyes... but was it really the sun, or was it Ali's face?
Yes, I know there are only three Charlie's Angels, but we're not fighting evil. We're playing PAINTBALL! If you've never played, you need to - it's so extremely hardcore. Of course, the balls do hurt, but you wear clothes under a jumpsuit and a full-face mask. Sometimes, though...
You do occasionally end up with a nasty battle wound. But don't worry, that just means you get a hardcore scar. Dude... this was taken probably five minutes after Kate got hit. It was SO funny... she's behind a little shelter, shooting, gets hit, drops her gun and runs away, yelps once and then starts laughing. She was like, "YES! I got a battle wound!" Ali saw it and goes, "I want a battle wound!"
My friends are insane. The guys worshipped her for the rest of the week for being "hardcore". It was insane.
THAT is Jonathan. He's somewhere near twenty and lives in North Carolina, I think. He's such a great guy, too! He was our SWAT, which meant he helped out with the physical activites but not as much with the spiritual things, and sometimes he had to go help other groups [-tear-]. But he really was such a sweetheart. No matter HOW scared or upset you were, he never got impatient or anything, just tried to help you out. We are so blessed with our counselors/SWATs... -sigh-
If I may take a moment of your time and show you LAST years counselor...
The man getting his hair braided, ladies and gentlemen, is 17-year-old Ryan Belk. He was our guy counselor last year. Which means we spent every activity with him, we would stop and talk to him... he taught me how to swim. And he's still hot, but only Ali got a picture of him, and she hasn't given it to me. So yeah. He's almost nineteen now, too! I love whoever assigns us to our counselors at Doe River.
Look, it's Ali, Megan and I! That was the morning we went kayaking... it was SO cold that Megan and I refused to go. Not because we couldn't kayak or anything, but they made you do a "wet exit", which was where you practiced what would happen if you DID flip, and nobody wanted to do that. So I took pictures instead! HOORAY pictures!
That's the lake the morning we went kayaking. The big stripped blob in the water is... well, the blob! One person sits on the end nearest to the water, and the other person jumps off the wooden deck, sending the person on the end flying into the air and then into the water. With life-jackets, of course.
Look, I bought a Red Bull on the ride home! Those things are sooooo good. I also had some of Ali's Vault, and Kate got one of those Starbucks things... we had FUN on the ride home... the nine hour ride home... -cue dramatic music and evil laughter- lol, jk. It WAS fun, though. LOL have you ever read the description on a Red Bull can? I don't remember all of it, but it says stuff like "Increases performance - Increases endurance - faster reaction time - ideal for high stress situation - increases energy"
lol. I love Red Bull.
Can anyone make this face except for Ali?! It's soooo annoying! She makes this face in like, half the pictures I take of her! NO one else could do it. SUPER annoying.
This is Eric! He's going into eighth grade, but that doesn't stop him from being completely and totally awesome. He's eating Jujyfruits in the picture, which both he and Brian couldn't stop eating all week.
Jujyfruits are the WORST CANDY IN THE WORLD! They're like these gummy fruit chew things, but they're awful! They get stuck in your teeth and they have no flavor and they're really hard to chew and EW but they're SO ADDICTING!
I tried a lot of new things on this trip... Jujyfruits, Red Bull, Love...
Love is actually the term we all used to refer to those cookies & cream hersheys bars... ever tried making smores with those? No? TRY IT! It's seriously LOVE in edible form.
Sorry, I keep getting off-topic.
Hey, I know! Let's watch Brian pole-dance!
This is what happens when we try and play tetherball.
The...noises you hear are the noises Ali makes as she hits the ball. She can't hit it unless she makes that noise, either. Very funny.
Brian cheated. That's the people you hear - us yelling at him and laughing.
You know, for a Christian group, we're all very comfortable with our sexuality... and with being extremely sexual... our youth minister filmed that before asking Brian why he was pole-dancing.
From left to right - Eric, Neal, and Brian. They're all suited up to go on the zipline. The zipline was so cool. I was too scared to go, but almost everybody else did. These three went on it upside down until the very last second when they either HAD to flip or risk breaking their necks. They scared us all. It was awesome, though.
The train you can see in the distance is actually renovated open train cars. They have benches and everything and one of them is Sidetrack, the cafe where we would all hang out at night. And any OTHER time we were bored.
Oh, and then there was the time Brian was mountainboarding down this hill and wiped out, FLIPPING OVER AND SENDING HIS BOARD FLYING INTO HIS HEAD, knocking him out and giving him a concussion. He seriously blacked out for, I dunno, five minutes? It was SCARY.
You know what's worse than watching a kid who's like your brother knock himself out? Having HIM tell you that about half an hour after he got out of the clinic. He freaked us all out! But that worked out fine, because we just spent the next twenty minutes fussing over him. He got so POed... funny stuff.
The white tent, called The Big Top, is where we had worship. The green cars on the hill above it were the railcars, where a few of the girls groups stayed. We stayed in one of them. There are actually five up there, one group to each car. They're tiny, but they're a lot of fun.
Ignore the people on the hill. That's basically what the view was when you looked out of our railcar. The building is the Depot, where we went to get meals and in case of a thunderstorm or something like that.
That's the Little Big Top, where we ate our meals.
It's so pretty up there... It feels like you're in a completely different world, it really does. You don't have cell phones, computers, iPods, electronics of almost any kind. It feels like time's just... stopped and that there's nothing but you and the people around you and God. It's great.
Another group pic, this time on the steps of the railcar where we stayed! Yay for Team Extreme! [that's what we called ourselves. We even made up a cheer. It was pretty sweet. Ask me about it and I'll show you. Really.]
*WARNING*
Nothing inappropriate or homosexual in any way happened at this camp. However, I'm really good at catching people in positions that make things appear to be very different than they actually are. If seeing people of the same gender in compromising positions freaks you out, you might want to not look at the pictures below. Nothing actually happened except some friendly hugging, but it might appear different to someone who wasn't there. I put these pictures up because [a] I find them funny, and [b] Brian didn't think I had the guts to. Plus, it proves just how pervy the guys at my church are. However, if it bothers you, again, just don't look at them.
Of course, Neal and his best friend Brian Malantis have some issues with decency.
We turn away for ten seconds, and this is what happens.
Which leads to this. Honestly... do boys think of nothing else?! And you know what's even scarier? Neither of them are gay. Both have dated girls [trust me, I know exactly what they've done with girls.] And yet, they're perfectly comfortable with this. At Christian camp. In full view of our youth minister, our counselor, and Brian's mom - who happens to be sitting at the table with them. Of course...
The boys apparently aren't the only ones comfortable with it...But at least the girls waited until we were in the cabin! [All four of them will KILL me if they ever sees these up on the internet... lol.]
Neal might have just been feeling jealous that Brian was molesting Eric's head, though.
Eventually, Brian, Neal, Rex, and Brian's "little brother" Luke seemed to come to an agreement. Brian's on top, Rex is below him, Neal is below him, and Luke's on the bottom - with Eric in the background.