The food at camp wasn’t bad but it wasn’t gourmet either. After the first few days I became a vegetarian. We were given three meals a day and a nighttime snack. Frequently there would be insufficient amounts of food and some tables would have to do without, but it wasn’t always my table. I found that when the campers arrived the meals became less healthy and more greasy. Fries and hotdogs became commonplace. We played a lot of get to know you games before the campers arrived. We learned first aid and CPR, had swimming and canoeing tests that anyone could pass, and went to different activity stations. We learned about tripping and had to write introductory parents letters to the parents of each camper to soothe the nerves of worried parents. This was quite a bit of work because you had to read their files and get to know the campers in order to write about them. Then you had to try to be original and sincere. You also had to write a good draft on unlined paper and you were only given one sheet of good copy paper. One interesting event during staff training was the overnight canoe trip. We were randomly put into groups of nine and sent to different locations in Algonquin Park. Somehow my group ended up without a guide so we were given an easy route with only a 300 m portage. It was a really scenic route to Tom Thomson Lake. To get there we paddled a few different lakes. One had really high cliffs and we stopped there and some crazy people jumped off them but not me! We went over a beaver damn and my group reached our lake first so we had first pick at the campsites. We found one out on a peninsula where there were hardly any bugs. It was a great site with smooth rocks facing west. We laid in the sun all afternoon after lunch and read. Some girls decided to make loin cloths out of old sheets but I wasn’t too keen on the idea myself. Later that night we ate supper and had a camp fire. We swam and canoed. We put up tents using paddles and sticks. Some girls went over to the guys’ campsite and stole their canoes. They put them on an island. We thought it was great but the next morning all our canoes were gone and we had to signal
