Senior Trip, Day One

The day divided neatly into 3 parts. Paintball, pre-dinner, and post-dinner. I like to do many things and paintball is one of the few things I have never had even the slightest desire to do. I wasn't alone in this inclination so the bunch of us sat around a little pond doing ain'tball for what seemed like hours but was in fact, well, hours. Finally, after we'd been sitting around for about 3 hours we talked the bus driver to drive us into the adorable little town of Jim Thorpe, PA, a few miles back. We had ice cream (I had a root beer float, though one of the students reminded me it's the ice cream that floats). On the way back one resident overheard our conversations about Jim Thorpe and went on a tirade about how horrible it was, that the town had nothing to do with Jim Thorpe himself, that his wife "bought" the town and made them change the name (from its much more attractive name, Mauch Chunk) and then became a kind of out of control trollop. Then, a driver yelled at a bunch of us for crossing not at a crosswalk, so the town was dubbed Angry Town.

After a not-too-long bus ride, we arrived at Split Rock Lodge in Lake Harmony, PA. I've been in places like this before. It's a full-service resort on a huge plot of land with a bunch of condo complexes around a main lodge/activities building. The condos are usually time shares and people rent a condo or a room in the lodge and partake of the myriad activities available. In tune with my prior experiences with this kind of place, the lodge is reasonably pleasant, slightly run down and functional, and the activities are mostly second-rate, but they're there. They have a way of looking like they were built in some bygone era, whether it's the 50's the 70's or the 90's. I'm sharing a suite with another teacher and we have 2 little bedrooms and a not-unpleasant living room with a kitchenette. In the entire suite we have 2 windows, one is a skylight in the living room that I just figured out how to open and the other is in my bedroom and opens into a 25 foot wide hallway.

The hallway is a natural gathering place for the kids, which is kind of nice. After dinner, all of us chaperones (I'll touch on the whole chaperone thing later) went for a walk around the property until we realized that we'd managed to get every chaperone 1/2 mile away from the lodge at the same time, so we toddled back. Some kids swam, others played ping pong, and whatever else. Eventually, some went to sleep (paintball is apparently very draining, and so, I can say with certainty, is ain'tball), and the rest of us hung out in the hallway, watched baseball or a seemingly endless hockey game on tv, or some combination thereof.

As chaperones, we have to go to bed last, which in this case means 1:00 AM. So we all participated in the hallway activities. It was kind of like a coffee house without tables and chairs. Or coffee. I can't speak for the other faculty, but I played Apples to Apples, listened to and played guitar, told kids to stop picking up other kids and whirling them around, and talked talked talked. Let me be honest and say that as a species I don't think teenagers are the most interesting of people. I agree with my grandmother-in-law who proclaimed teenagers to be inherently the most conservative people in the world because they all dress alike and act alike, but with this particular group I have to diverge. I think it's because the school is so accepting of different kinds of kids, and the kids are generally nice to each other, there's a terrific diversity here and I'm never bored talking with the kids in this school.

We got the last stragglers into their room at around 1 and left them in the charge of an unusually serious security guard, who was ultimately rewarded for his efforts by having his chair stolen while he was making his rounds.

More to come...