What's the biggest ship in the world?! The friendSHIP!

The title of this blog is something that every Caribou camper will hear during their time with us at camp.
 Camp is about the friendships, the people and the memories we make here together. It's amazing how quickly campers form friendships, and we're so proud to have such a wonderful community of boys who are ready and willing to make a new friend, to help another camper, and to live by our slogan, "it's cool to be nice at Camp Caribou". We're lucky to have such a special group of campers and staff from all over the world!

Smiling Faces! 

Don't worry, the kid with making the silly face in the background just wanted to show me his back-scratch-er and get it in the picture! He wasn't trying to hit anyone! :)

We cannot believe how quickly our first session flew by! We had an absolutely fantastic visiting day, and then three days later our second session began. Even though we miss our first session friends, it's SO exciting to have all of our second session kids here, and the full season campers are so amazing at helping everybody get comfortable as soon as possible. A perfect example of that was at campfire tonight! We had loads of new campers get up in front of the entire camp and tell jokes, demonstrate their "stupid human tricks" of amazing flexibility, perform skits, play music, and more! It takes an amazing amount of courage to get up in front of the whole camp when you only just arrived a few days ago (even if you've been here all summer it takes courage), and we absolutely loved it!! Everyone who performs receives a tremendous amount of support, cheering, and applause from the whole camp, and we encourage all to participate. It was such a terrific way to really kick off the session with some major positive energy circulating and lots of laughs and smiles.
 The second session is already going full speed ahead with a wilderness trip to Mt. Tumbledown going out tomorrow, instructionals, electives, bunk night, socials, commando capture the flag, special programs coming up like the Round Ball Classic, and more!

Listening to the sounds of nature! We could hear the loons!

Learning to serve!

The oldest boys are going out on "trip week" (not really a week, but 3 days/2 nights) starting on Sunday morning and they're really excited. The "Super Seniors", who are the oldest campers are so excited to be going to Montreal (something they've looked forward to for years!) and the second oldest boys are going on an awesome trip to southern coastal Maine for some rock climbing, surfing, water parks and more!

While they're away, we have some extra special awesome activities planned for the junior camp, and they always have a great time being the "big boys" on campus for a couple of days.

The weather up here has been absolutely gorgeous and we've been hydrating and applying sunscreen all day long!

Everyone is happy, healthy and having fun, and we hope the same for you!

Time Flies When We're Having FUN!!

WOW! We just cannot believe how camp is flying by! It's crazy to think that Visiting Day is next weekend already! The boys are doing GREAT!! Everybody is "feeling the flow" and visibly much more comfortable here. We've had a crazy busy week with more to come! We've had CMCL soccer, baseball, lacrosse, hockey, golf, and basketball for most of the age groups, and tomorrow we have ropes, tennis, soccer and volleyball. On Saturday we've got more baseball and basketball coming up. (We divide the tournament days by age groups, so that we don't compete in all age groups in the same sport on one day..it minimizes the time that  we have to wait for fields/courts, etc.)
We've also had some amazing wilderness trips going on! We just had our first hiking trip for the younger ones up to Camden Hills in Camden, Maine, and they loved it! They were all excited about seeing the Ocean in Maine! Lots of kids who had never been on a trip before were on that trip, and they had a fabulous time. We now have another trip out to the St. Croix River (canoeing of course). All the kids were excited to see the Canadian border! :)
We've also had some great programs this week! Commando Capture the flag, Lip Sync, Waterfest, Cookie Bowl, all-camp movie, and of course, the world famous Camp Caribou 4th of July fireworks extravaganza!!! Our resident pyrotechnic genius, Marc Weymouth aka WEYMO put on an absolutely fantastic show and the kids were going nuts for it! It capped off a wonderful 4th of July. We had the America's Cup tournament all day on the 4th where each camper is put on a team, the teams are all different States in the Nation, and the winner gets... you guessed it, THE AMERICA'S CUP!! Very exciting! :) We had a lovely outdoor picnic on the front lawn of The Lodge and the kids got a yummy all-American meal...fried chicken, biscuits, salad, potato salad, macaroni salad, and RED sugar cookies with red, white and blue sprinkles! All HOME MADE by our one and only 31 year veteran head chef, Sue Gilbert. She's the "awesomest" as some of the kids like to say! :) So I know this is a short Blog post, but I'm already late for campfire, so I've gotta get going! We're giving out the 5 year jackets to our 5 year campers tonight and they're all "psyched" to wear their jackets with pride. We are so proud to have a camp with such wonderful boys. We feel very lucky to have the pleasure of spending time with each and every Caribou camper, and we thank you for sharing them with us!!