This year the 6th grade, after Camp Cheerio got canceled, got to go to Camp Hanes instead. This is my experience there.

When I got onto the bus Jennifer, Isabella, Emily, and I had taken the seats on the back of the bus. After everyone was seated, we had started eating and trading candy with Chris, Beck and some other people in the back. After we had taken a break from eating candy so we didn’t run out, Isabella, Jennifer, and I had started to play this car game. What you did is you picked a color. For example, I did red at first and you count how many red cars there are, and whoever has the highest number of cars wins. The first round Isabella won, she chose the color blue. I had gotten second place with the color red, and Jennifer was third with the color yellow. After that round, we played another game and I got first with the color blue. After a while, Mr. Harris played Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. By the end of the bus ride we had watched almost all of the movie. When we got to Camp Hanes there was a counselor that gave us instructions when we were in the bus, like where to put our bags and things like that. After we had put our bags in the gymnasium, we went into another room and the counselors introduced themselves to us. After that, we played some games then we got told what cabin we were in. I was with Jennifer, Isabella, and Emily, Anya, Emily, Madeline, Quinn, Jade, Emilia, Ms. Ellis, and Ms. Salas in cabin eight. After we were told our cabin, we went to our cabins to put our things away, to be told what group we were in, and what our activities for the day were. I was in group six with Emily and some other people, and the activities we did for the first day were canoeing then archery then rock climbing then team building games.

The activities we did were pretty fun. The first activity, canoeing, was okay. We learned how to get into the canoe and how to paddle, things like that. Then my group and I got to go in the canoes with a partner or two and go canoeing. After that we did archery. In archery we took turns with the bow and arrow and while you waited you could play this game with a metal ring that you try to throw and hook in up on a hook attached to the wall. After archery we did rock climbing. The rock climbing walls were auto belays which basically is a machine that automatically belays you. On top of the climbing walls was this net like thing they call a sky hammock. What you do to get to it is either you can use the pixie sticks which are like wooden bars placed in random angles in like a netted in area, or you can do these mini climbing walls that lead up to the sky hammock. The last activity we did was team building games. For team building games we did multiple different games. One of the games we did was we had to stay in a circle and we had to pass a stuffed dog around and we had to get it around as fast as possible. Another one of the games was everyone was in a circle with a rope that couldn’t go above your n. Another game we did was there were two groups and each group chose one person to be the one blindfolded, your group had to direct you to a pool noodle that the counselor was holding and moving around a bit. After the person got the pool noodle they had to hit the other blindfolded person.

I’m really grateful that we got to go! It was a really fun experience and the food was good. I’m also really happy that I got to be in a cabin with all of my friends. I’m really proud that I tried to walk on the sky hammock without holding onto anything. Thank you to all the counselors!