By Dylan McDonough
It was a chilly morning as I bustled out of the car on a Tuesday morning of December 11th. The warm feeling of camp greeted me as I trudged up the hill to Ridge Hall. This Camp Roger was called “Explorers”.
Our main meeting place is usually at Boy’s Hill. This time it was at Ridge Hall. The day started off with Mr. Doug reading us the Christmas story from The Jesus Storybook Bible. He sat on the hearth of the grand fireplace while the fire was slowly dying.
Our first leader was Julia. She took us downstairs in Ridge Hall. There were four maps of Michigan laid out. We learned what it’s like to be a cartographer. At first I thought they were people who took pictures of carts! They are actually people who design and make maps. We were learning from a map of Michigan. This map, like most maps, has a key. It shows pictures and marks which represent places and landmarks. We used the index to find cities by their coordinates. Like the game of Battleship, you can match the coordinates to find the city. We used letters for latitude and numbers for longitude. Do you want to know how many miles away a city is? The map also had a key showing the distance in miles between cities in Michigan. There was another map of Kent County. This one was focused on where we live than the Michigan map. The other maps were even more zoomed in on just Grand Rapids and then just Camp Roger. We saw relief maps to show us the mountains. The closer the curved lines of the mountain, the steeper it is.
After we learned about relief lines, our group got to make our map of Little Bostwick Lake. We were separated into group of two. I drew the map and Asher labeled it. It was very fun. After we finished the maps, The Blazing Bobcats went back to Ridge Hall.
On the second adventure, we went with Hannah. Our group went outside with handheld GPS devices! We learned how to use them. These are really cool gadgets. This experience made me want to get into Geocaching. We selected our destination and put it the GPS on the compass screen. It told us how many miles away we were from our destination. We had to find, when the GPS said so, a jar with riddles and another object. One riddle was, “What five letter word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it?” The answer was short! The object was marshmallows. The second object was marshmallow roasting. You guessed it, it was s’mores time! There was already a campfire going. My marshmallow was perfectly crisp but within two seconds my poor little marshmallow’s top caught on fire. I ate it but I still need practice. After the s’mores tragedy, we had lunch.
When lunch was over, Mary Jo showed us how to make an origami boat. We put them on the Christmas tree. Then some of us cut big snowflakes out of paper. The results were very impressive. The other kids made a Christmas chain out of paper. It was really long. When we finished with the decorations, we enjoyed hot cocoa, delicious Christmas cookies and riddles! We had to guess the name of a Christmas song. For example, “A Knight with Holes” is “O Holy Night”.
Anything with adventure to me is great. I liked using the handheld GPS devices. Maps seem difficult to read at first, but knowing how to use them makes them very interesting to me. Once again, Camp Roger did not disappoint!
