Year 6-7 Camp

 I’m back! But only just…spending a week with 62 alien life forms was definately interesting!

The camp was fantastic, but very, very tiring. A ‘memorable’ moment, some would say for the wrong reasons, was the trip to Kalgoorlie. Memorable mostly because it was so LONG! We departed school at 9am on the Monday, arriving at the camp school between 11.30 and 12 that night! This was NOT the plan, but due to significant delays on the prospector, the train ride took 9 hours instead of 6. The most significant delay saw us spend 1 hour on the train at Koolyanobbing(pictured) due to frieght trains. 62 eleven and twelve year olds on a 15 hour journey…fun!

Though the trip was tough, it was still fun. However, the first ‘day’ per see was not over. We finally got settled in to the camp school and all the children in bed by about 12.30-1am…only for Kal to have a power shortage sending the school alarms into all kinds of disarray! So the teachers and I madly ran around trying to work out why the sky was falling in, eventually calling the camp principal who had to come into the school at 2am to stop the alarm. This was also much fun!

Finally, by about 2.30am the kids were asleep, or at least mostly quiet, and the teachers got to bed…only to get up 4 hours later.

The rest of the week was go, go, go and we never did ‘catch up’, but it was such a fantastic week and we watched, the kids mature before our very eyes. For most of them this was by far the longest time they had spent away from their parents, and it caused them to ‘mature’ in many ways, which was both positive and negative at times!

Overall I had a blast, and this camp definately helped me in my role as school chaplain!