Today wasn’t actually a day at camp. Something that some people don’t know is how Pearce Williams operates.
At Pearce Williams we see campers for 5 days a week – in an overnight camp setting. Campers arrive at 7pm on Sunday nights and leave at 3pm on Friday – most weeks. After the long weekend in August we start on Monday night for Leadership Campers and Tuesday night for Primary (ages 5 to 7) campers.
We rent our facility out on weekends to other groups – so our staff have a staff meeting after campers leave on Friday and then clean camp – ready for the rental groups to come in at 6pm. Rental groups leave at 1pm on Sundays and our staff arrive to start getting everything set for that week at 2pm on Sundays.
This schedule means that our staff get the weekends off. This is the way that I grew up working at camp – arrive on Sundays – leave on Sunday night – have Saturday to do whatever you wanted – (growing up that meant working on the farm). So Saturdays off as a camp staff make perfect sense to me.
I worked for 5 summers at the Taylor Statten Camps, you didn’t get Saturdays off – one day off per week for the summer months – this is the way that many private and non-profit camps run – ones that have two, three and four week sessions. So after moving back to United Church Camping – I was pleased that I would get my Saturday’s back to me.
Today – a trip to Michigan to get some new cooking grills for our Wilderness Camp program. Got lots of other things as well. It was a good day.
Ready for tomorrow – campers arrive – time to get this camp started.