🇺🇸Various campers

Sorry for the chaos, but I think it's perfect — that's what this whole week has been. We had a big idea and a clear plan, and then suddenly everything started changing. First, we'd rented the same venue we used last summer. Around January, we heard that the Washington school district had changed its end-of-school date, which now overlapped with our camp time. So we had to find a new place.

When you run something like this, you put down deposits — and if you don't follow through on the rental, you still owe the balance, which would have been huge for us. We tried to find another place that would keep this money intact. The owners of the previous venue had only one more house available, but it cost twice the rent we'd budgeted. To cover it, we needed half again as many participants. Our region doesn't have that many people; some regions don't even have this many, like our two city-states. So we put out flyers and started recruiting. We needed 50 people to pay for the venue.

In the end we got our 50 people, right on the last day. Then we had to find a team leader for each team — 10 more people. Then kitchen staff: to feed this many people, you need about eight in the kitchen. And then a core staff to run everything. We ended up with an 80-person equation, which is a lot. I can tell you, I didn't anticipate how much of a lot it was.

We had our 50 people — and on the day of departure, four of them suddenly came down with COVID. They didn't show up, and we had to scramble. Then some Amazon shipments to my house — the main things for cooking, a grill and food — just disappeared. The tracking showed they'd arrived, but I couldn't find them anywhere. I ran around knocking on neighbors' doors. Nobody answered my calls, because it was a weekend.

I came here, sent everybody on ahead, then drove back to my house. I looked at the neighbor's house again, and just then somebody came out. I asked: "Did you receive my packages?" "Oh yes," he said. So we got the two packages — but we were already an hour behind. And it's an eight-hour drive.

I want to stop here and say: nothing we'd planned logistically worked for the whole week. We arrived an hour and a half late because of all of it. I'm core staff — the main person organizing everything with Alicia, so we set all our…