It seemed like April would never come back in September, when we were told about our end-of-term Firbush trip, but the day is upon us, and the bus leaves at 9:30 tomorrow morning. I've packed as much as I can tonight, and the rest will be dealt with in the morning. Until then, I have my bug spray and my bathing suit (ha!), and I'll have pleasant dreams of hanging out in the middle of nowhere with two-thirds of my class.
And dreams of my last YGC retreat, which had its less-than-pleasant moments, like waking up to find mites in my bedding. Guess who got new sheets when she got back to New Haven?
The thing is, I'm not a particularly outdoorsy person. We never did any camping when I was a kid - my mother's idea of roughing it is the Holiday Inn, as we like to say - and so I'm slightly inept at this whole 'outdoor retreat' shtick. Granted, Firbush isn't a tent complex or anything, and odds are it's better insulated than Camp Chinqueka's horrid mite-infested 2x4 cabins ($2,000 for two weeks of summer camp? I think not) - but I'm hoping for heating, even in April. This is Scotland, and the only advice I've been given regarding Firbush is "Pack sweaters".
Perhaps I'm being a little rough on Chinqueka. For non-YGCers, Chinqueka is a girls' camp in quasi-rural Connecticut that features, among other things, 14 non-insulated cabins, a lake for skinny dipping, a water trampoline that...ahem...broke, various benches for econ problem sets, and a steady supply of teabags for the mornings when you wake up, clean the bugs off of yourself, and stumble into the main room with a baritone voice. We used it as our fall retreat every year I was in the group, and it was intense - Connecticut is colder than you'd think in September, and when you wake up in a freezing cabin, shower in an outdoor stall that probably hasn't been mucked out since the campers left, and sit down with Mozart after breakfast, you can see why the Social Chairs brought booze. Then again, we also had our annual square dancing night, a dance party, plenty of card games, and the aforementioned skinny dipping (I opted out of that - Connecticut's cold, and the juniors always steal the seniors' clothes). Chinqueka is a rite of passage, forced bonding through griping, and a chance to wake up on the floor of the main hall with your sixty new best friends on the second morning, look around, and realize that you're still cold but that the mites are at bay. Some people never showered. I was one of the princesses who not only did so multiple times, but brought her own hairdryer to boot.
The hairdryer is coming to Firbush. We can't bring our own booze, but I'm sure someone will figure something out. Still, I'm going to miss not waking up and singing something in Latin/spirituals/Meredith Monk, drinking styrofoam cups of Lipton tea, and square dancing with Yankees and the coolest should-be-dead-by-now caller I've ever seen. I will not miss the mites.
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