“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see”.

Good evening everybody. My name is Woody, and this is Woody’s Word, our camp blog, and our window – if you like – to the outside world beyond the shores of Sand Lake. What we hope to do here every night, is to tell you all what we have been doing and how things are going. It will be general in nature, and will act as an addendum to the Megaphone, our daily camp ‘newspaper’, that will also be posted on-line.

We could not have asked for better weather for the arrival of the buses at 3.10 this afternoon. Already gathered were 45 very excited boys, many of whom had stayed here at camp after our annual Father and Son camp, a three day get together of fathers and sons that precedes the real thing. Joining them would be 110 more boys, primarily from the Chicagoland area, but also from as far as away as Arizona and California out west, and Florida and Maryland out east. We are fortunate to be able to ‘pull’ from all over the country. Indeed, in the second session in July we will be hosting campers from overseas, too. But for now we have 150 boys that make up camp, a number that includes more than 20 boys who are here for their first time.

As is usual for the first few hours at camp, it was necessary to get some admin’ stuff out of the way. Signing up for activities always takes some time, and the health checks and letter writing are just things that we have to get done. But we got it done!

Then we all got into the mess hall for dinner (always a raucous affair on the first night), before heading out into the gully for the traditional first-night activity, Capture the Flag. After sitting on the bus for some six hours, there was a lot of stored energy just waiting to explode into action. And so it did!

We ended the day down at the bonfire by the lake. It was a still, warm night; a perfect night, in fact, for sitting round a campfire with your friends. We did a little getting-to-know-you, told some jokes, shared some stories, then sang Taps and headed to bed.

In short, we have a had successful start to the summer of ’23, and all is well, so safely rest.

Goodnight everybody

As ever….WOODY!