Welcome Back Home, Campers! 

With the camp season starting to close, now is a good time to assess how the season went. Take some time to ask your child and reflect on the camp stay. Did your child meet the main goals of summer camp? They almost certainly had fun, but can you notice any athletic, artistic, intelligent, or personal growth? What about their social skills? Did they learn from a positive role model? 

Gear

Go through the gear your child brought back from camp. Now is a great time to check over gear while your kid’s stay is still fresh in their head. Ask them what worked and what didn’t… Did anything break? Does anything need its batteries replaced? Does anything need to be repaired? Did your kid understand how to use everything? Did they have everything they needed?

Guidelines

Do your best to gauge how certain arrangements worked out for everyone. Was the stay too long? Too short? Was the camp too far from home? Too close? Did the travel go smoothly? Did your child attend a coed camp or all single gender camp? Was it the best fit for them? Did your child have the opportunity to do the activities they really wanted to do? Was going to camp with a friend a good idea or not? 

Go Again

Did the summer camp season leave you disappointed and unimpressed? While this certainly isn’t the norm, it’s not unheard of for children to have an unpleasant summer camp experience. However, I cannot stress this next point enough—just because your kid didn’t like their summer camp, doesn’t mean that they don’t like SUMMER CAMP. 

If you didn’t pick the right camp for your kid, there’s still hope to find a different one that your kid will enjoy next year. Finding a dud camp stinks for that summer visit, but it doesn’t have to ruin summer camp for the remainder of a childhood. 

Be sure to put in further preparation and research on a camp before settling on the right one! Check out ‘The Summer Camp Handbook’ for better guidance on finding a great summer camp. As always, thanks for reading, Camp Folks! 

- John

Hey, Storytellers! 

Summers are jam-packed! Especially so as the season nears the end and we all try to fit all our fun plans in as best we can before summer is officially over. Speaking of—don’t miss out on the opportunity to share your camp story with our widespread camp community, not to mention win a cool participatory prize from Everything Summer Camp! 

Throughout the month we’ve been and will continue to be taking your submissions for our annual ‘Share Your Camp Story’ Contest here at Everything Summer Camp. Get your memories and stories written down and entered or make a YouTube video and send the video link into us! Our final call is just exactly two weeks away on the last minute of August 31. 

Remember, everyone who submits gets a $20 gift certificate to Everything Summer Camp. Or you may be one of the ten, random, and lucky winners! Once we have everyone’s submissions, we’ll randomly select our winners and publish each of their stories one day at a time leading up to our grand prize winner of a $300 Everything Summer Camp Gift Certificate! 

In between, we’ll have three winners of the second-place, $100 Gift Certificate prize and six winners of our third-place, $50 Gift Certificate. 

Storytelling is an extremely useful means for campers to cement all the fun memories and valuable skill sets they acquired at camp. It’s great to review the new experiences you’ve had to help yourself process and reflect on what you learned. Need help with some ideas of what to talk about? Check out the initial Contest announcement I wrote last month.  

Include your first name and your last name initial, the camp you visited, and how many summers you’ve spent at camp. Parents are more than welcome to send us their submissions based on camp from their perspective or their own camp experiences as well. 

We love getting these camp stories each year and are so excited to get a fresh new collection of stories for the season! Share your stories by clicking right here. And, as always, thanks for reading, Camp Folks! 

- John

Hey, Camp Folks! 

With the camp season kicked into full gear, perhaps you’ll come across the summer camp that you’re attending this season as we continue to add to our Summer Camp Spotlight category of Blog posts. Today, we’re fixing our camp spotlight over to the East Coast in Vermont where we are checking out Sangamon Summer Camp for boys, ages 9 to 16.  

Camp Sangamon was built on 200 picturesque acres that feature sunny fields, cool woods, 20 acres of a spring-fed lake, and plenty more! A totally renovated farmhouse from the 19^th century brings the campers together for mealtimes. They’re kitchen prides itself on using fresh ingredients—some of which they grow themselves. The majority of their meals are made from scratch and they always offer vegetarian alternatives. 

There’s tons of fun going on at Sangamon. Try your hand at Archery, Soccer, Mountain biking, Tennis, Horseback Riding, Hiking, Camping Trips, Gardening, and lots more! The weekends pack in even more fun with cabin cook-outs on Saturdays, cabin nights on Sundays, and a free-for-all, all-camp games that keeps the campers ready for anything! 

Sangamon campers are treated to the simple pine board cabins with fieldstone fireplaces! There is no electricity, though they do offer modern, portable LED lanterns for easy nightly navigation. Each cabin houses eight to ten campers along with three cabin leaders. Often enough, the leaders are joined by an intern—the term at Sangamon for folks in their third year of the camp counselor-in-training program. 

The pioneer spirit is kept alive at Camp Sangamon through the buildings they make, the small farm and garden that they run, and their daily practices among the natural world. Sangamon campers are taught to appreciate and coexist in nature. Is Camp Sangamon the camp for you? Let us know in the comments any fun times you’ve had at Camp Sangamon and, as always, thanks for reading! 

- John

Hey, Ball Fans! 

Who can resist the old-fashioned call of Baseball?! It’s come quite a long way from hitting a ball with a stick in an alley. Baseball today is far from your great-grandfather’s baseball. Instead of an unorganized activity for fun after school, it’s become the Major Leagues, Homeruns, Stadium Hot Dogs, and Bob Uecker. This is the story of America’s favorite pastime and how it got be the way it is now. 

Baseball is a sport that dates back over 250 years to 1744 and likely long before that. John Newbery’s children’s book ‘A Little Pretty Pocket-Book’ includes a brief poem and an illustration depicting a game called base-ball. Instead of flat plates, the illustration shows the bases being marked by tall posts. 

Many variations of bat-and-ball games that involve bases have existed throughout the years. They’ve gone by many different names as well. Such games have been called ‘Bass-Ball’, ‘Playing at Base’, ‘Play with Balls and Sticks’, ‘Rounders’, and countless more. Rounders in particular highly resembled the modern game of baseball that we all know and love. 

‘Rounders’ was played on a diamond-shaped infield with a base at each corner—the fourth base being the spot where the batter originally stood at to hit the bat and make their way around the bases. Three strikes and you’re out…three outs a team’s turn at bat came to an end. Baseball was taking shape. 

By 1854, reputable baseball clubs put their heads together and made modifications to the game play as well as the proper ball weight and size. They settled on the dimensions in between bases along with a number of other points on specific rules when certain circumstances play out—matters that have remained in place to this day! 

Enjoy playing your own variations of this game—whether it’s an organized team that you join or just a casual game of catch in our backyard! As always, thanks for reading, Camp Folks! 

- John

Hey, Camp Folks! 

We pride ourselves here at Everything Summer Camp on our C&N camp trunks and the accessories we offer so you can get the most out of our footlocker trunks. Accessories like our Wheel Away System, the LidMate Organizer, or Glide & Go Tray allow your trunk to offer you simple transportation as well as extra storage in an otherwise unusable space! 

We offer plenty more like our Trunk Liner, Snap-On Duffel, Packing Cubes, Nameplates, Padlocks, and even more than that. 

Our latest trunk accessory, the Reversible Cushioned Trunk Topper turns your trunk into a cushioned seat where you can take a quick moment to lace up a pair of shoes or get comfortable as you go around a circle of camp friends playing “Truth or Dare?” 

The two-inch-thick foam cushion is a dense, yet comfortable material. We designed this Topper with a cuff along the bottom to stretch over the lid of your footlocker top. It features an elastic cord within the polyester fabric covering so it can stay in place on top of your trunk while remaining just as easy to take it off as it is to put it on. 

Whether it’s a solid color to give your camp trunk a different look or the graphic print, this Reversible Cushioned Trunk Topper creates a whole new mood for your environment. Flip it from its printed side to the complimentary solid color side when you want to go for a new look and change things up! 

Increase your comfort at camp and afterward as well with this cushy trunk cover! Pull up a trunk, have a seat, and get comfortable! Be sure to peruse all the other trunk accessories we offer so you can maximize your camp trunk! As always, thanks for reading, Camp Folks. 

- John