Staff Week!

The international staff arrived on 17^th and the American staff on the 19^th.  I had the privilege of driving down to collect a vanload of internationals from Logan airport in Boston.  I drove down the night before and spent the night at the Marriott in Andover before getting up early to be at the airport by 7am for the first arrival.  After4½ hours collecting 9 people from a variety of flights, gates, and terminals, we were able to hit the road and head up to camp.  A couple of days later, all the US staff arrived and we were able to get Staff week underway.  With this being an ACA year (every three years camps are inspected by the American Camping Association to maintain their accreditation) we needed to make extra sure we covered all our bases in regards to training.  Matt and I took schedules from previous years and added a lot of additional training in as well as making sure we covered all the usual bases.  With a reduced staff, we also had to find a way to make sure no activity training sessions overlapped to ensure as many people as possible were able to be trained in all the activities.  To make this task more difficult, we also still had a lot of work to get done preparing camp for the campers – while this is not unusual, and provides good bonding time for the staff, there was an unprecedented amount of work projects to get through this summer.  The staff did an amazing job getting through everything, and all the training went off without any dramas.  After a week of planning and running training sessions, meetings, and coordinating work projects, Matt and I were exhausted.  No rest though – the campers get here tomorrow and we have to be all go for them as well…