Camp life at IB kicked into high gear this week, as campers settled into our daily rotation schedule and participated in favorite camp activities like Cocoa House, Dino Night, Adventure Day, and Unbirthday. We took advantage of some sunny weather to take distance swims to the dam (swimming a total distance of two miles!), and work in the garden. We were supervised with our new goat, Jill, and our new meat chickens! Last Sunday, IB bid goodbye to our Senior Lodgers as they headed out on trips to canoe the Androscoggin River and hike Camel’s Hump. We enjoyed hearing stories of their adventures and watching their Trip Skits when they returned on Thursday!
The weather was rainy last Sunday, so we swapped the Cocoa House stage for the warmth of the Lodge and watched as campers from First and Big Lodge played guitar and ukulele, performed skits, and sang songs. We certainly have a group of very talented campers here! Their imaginations continued to shine on Monday evening when First Lodge and Big Lodge had a dinosaur-themed Lodge Night. Campers enjoyed designing their own dinosaur costumes out of cardboard, pipe cleaners, and paint. They came up with creative dinosaur names like IBsaurous, Catasaur, and Colliago Tabouli Wasabi. After creating their dinosaur personas, the campers rotated through games of Pterodactyl, Dinosaur tea parties, and Extinction Support Groups. The campers all enjoyed taping their index and middle fingers together and eat brownies like T-Rexes as the evening came to a close.
On Tuesday, we pressed the “pause” button on our regular IB routine as campers set off for adventures on F&W property and throughout the surrounding area. Groups of IBers traveled to Buttermilk Falls to adventure through a local waterfall, hiked to the Plymouth General Store for penny candy, took a canoe-tour of our Woodward Reservoir’s unique population of carnivorous pitcher plants, hiked 13 miles to summit the nearby peaks of Pico, Killington, and Shrewsbury, and learned homesteading skills such as baking bread, making ice-cream, and quilting. The campers all came back for dinner at IB, eager to share stories of their adventures! “I love to cook and make my own stuff,” one camper said about her Homesteading Adventure. “It’s great to know I’m able to make it myself, plus I got to play with the barn cat.” No matter if they were running through an obstacle course or making mozzarella cheese, the campers all had a fun-filled adventure day!
On Wednesday campers celebrated their un-birthdays together. It was a festive evening full of cake, song, and pin the tail on the alpaca. In their un-birthday wishes some camper wishes included “an end to global warming”, “a year filled with cake”, “a billion cats” and “that all [their] cabin mates have an awesome session and summer.”
Our campers have enjoyed applying their creativity to all that they do here at IB. Whether they’re singing songs while sweeping the lodge, or imagining a biography for a chicken during a morning at Barns & Gardens, IB-ers are always alight with imagination. Below, we’ve included a poem one of our Big Lodge campers wrote about our piglets, Frederick Hammy Hamilton and Kevin Bacon. We hope this gives you a taste of the kind of creativity our campers bring to every chore and activity.
It’s been another busy week here at IB, and we’re glad to have all of our campers back from trips once again. Make sure to check back next week to hear about more camp adventures!