Mendocino

Yesterday afternoon I got back from Camp Mendocino, which was a lot of fun. Our four hour drive out there on Wednesday was uneventful aside from the last half hour, which was a narrow dirt road through the middle of the forest that left me rather nauseous and at a few points fearing for my life. The camp itself is very secluded in the middle of a redwood forest, and aside from train tracks and a helipad is pretty much isolated from the outside world. Absolutely beautiful, but rather cold. Being a New Yorker, I dealt with it just fine, but a few people were having trouble dealing with it. The worst was our first night there, when it got into the 40s, but the rest of the time wasn't that bad.

Wednesday night we spent playing the "newly team game", which involved trying to agree on which of our team members was most likely to do certain things. Our team bombed miserably, but we still had fun playing. Thursday we spent the morning in training and then went to a ropes course in the afternoon. The low elements they had were nothing new to me, but they had an awesome high ropes course with several things I'd never tried before, including a zipline that sent you flying over a river. They also had a nice rock wall, which about half of my team managed to complete. Friday we spent the first half of the day staining the awning of one of their buildings, which was fairly uneventful except for when Fayanna somehow managed to cover her face in stain. I had to lead her blind to the bathroom and help her wash up, good thing we had just done blindfolded trust activities the day before! She cleaned up and was fine, which I'm really grateful for. The rest of Friday was spent developing Individual Learning Plans and in one on one meetings with Melissa. That night there was a huge blue unit bonfire, including, skits, s'mores, dancing, and more of the Blue Unit Mythology, which is this kind of ridiculous, campy story the team leaders have been working on. Finally, yesterday morning we had the Amerilympics, a competition between all the teams in Blue Unit. Myself, Megan, and Emily won the four legged race (which was kinda tricky because I had to be facing the opposite direction as they were the whole time) for our team, but we didn't take any other event. However, no team ended up winning two events, so the winner was decided by a massive rock-paper-scissors game, which was rather anticlimactic. After the winning photos were taken all of us packed up and headed home, and I've been just relaxing since.