Mustaches mean business

This week, some of the guys decided to have a mustache appreciation week on camp, so I went all out with the handlebar mustache. I kept my goatee for Sunday so that I didn't sketch out the parents too badly but on Monday I shaved down to a handlebar mustache. It made for a lot of good laughs. At one point during the week, we where having watermelon and I discovered that we had a huge watermelon knife. Because I was trying to look sketchy, I decided it would be a good idea to pose with it.


Apart from the mustaches, the week was a massive adventure. The biking was relatively uneventful. We didn't go as far as the previous week, but we had a good time and nobody got hurt. The canoing, on the other hand was quite an adventure. The weather radio was saying scattered thunderstorms and a heat index of 100 degrees. As such, everybody was wearing swimsuits and I was carrying 6 extra gallons of water. About three hours into the trip, however, it started raining and the temperature started to drop. A lot of people were already wet because we had been swimming earlier, which didn't help. We got to a bridge and held all of the canoes together with Robbie (my co-counselor) hanging onto a rock so that we were out of the rain, but we weren't going to be able to hold on very long, so I started working on getting the canoes out of the water. We pulled them up onto the rocks and got everybody out and huddled up to try to warm up the people who where really cold.


I was hoping that the rain would pass and sun come out so we could continue the trip but when the rain continued I wanted to check in with camp (and my cell phone was in the med kit). Turns out, however, that there was no cell phone reception. Then a guy showed up from the canoe rental place and told us that the storm wasn't going to let up and the river was rising fast. I thought about trying to just get to our campsite for the night and then see what things looked like in the morning, but the canoe rental guy said that the site would probably be under water by the middle of the night. I decided to leave Robbie with the campers and go with the rental guy to try and call out. We drove to the top a hill and I got cell phone reception but the battery in my phone died. Then he took me to the canoe rental place and I used the phone there, but all the camp numbers where in my cell phone, which now didn't turn on. I called anybody who's number I could remember hoping that they would have internet and could look up the number, but nobody was home. Then I got the guy to drive me to bridge 10 where all of our stuff was with a van and a horse trailer. There, we had a back up cell phone with all of the numbers, so I was able to call in to camp and tell them the situation. Dick was already on the way out to meet us so they wanted me to sit tight until Dick got there. This was a little annoying because the canoe guy and I had already decided that we were going to drive the van and trailer to bridge 7 to get the campers into warmth (I had been gone for an hour and they were bordering hypothermia when I left). Luckily, Dick showed up in a couple minutes and fully supported my plan right away, so we where able to take off. So I ended up driving a 10 passenger van and a horse trailer back to camp, even though I'm not supposed to drive camp vehicles and I'm not supposed to transport campers. Just driving was an adventure because the rain was still going really hard and both the van and trailer where fully loaded, meaning there wasn't much braking or accelerating power. I was pretty happy when we where finally back on camp and safe.

I have a ton of other good pictures from the week, but the internet is being really slow around here this weekend.