Camp PEP (by Zander)

This year on vacances, I went to a camp called PEP in Mouthe.  And in the winter, it’s a skiing place.  And you know how the people make snow machines?  They do that there!  Well, when it’s really cold, they mix water with ice and the machine blows the ice and the water out and it’s snow!  Amazing.

There were 48 kids and 15 helpers and one was a boy!  The rest were all girls!

So we did swimming every day (the camp was only 3 days).  Well, when we went to the pool the first day, there was a test for everybody in my group.  So, there was only 6 kids that passed the test to go in the big side of the pool and me and Callie passed! We were allowed to go everywhere in the pool.  The other 14 kids were only allowed in the little pool.  And guess what?  There was a slippery slide to go down in the deep end only!  There were 3 helpers, who went in the water with the 6 kids, just for fun, and one lifeguard.  There were lots and lots of materials for the pool: noodles, diving rings, hula hoops, triangle diving rings that were heavy.  We weren’t allowed to use the normal rings – so I used the triangle rings - they are made so the top floats and the bottom sinks and then you can swim through the hoop.   And the last day the lifeguard said “Don’t push me in because I don’t know how to swim!”  We didn’t push him in, but one of the kids in the other group did – but he didn’t drown. 

We were supposed to go bike riding but there was too much snow!  So instead, we went skiing!  I fell like 100 times, because it’s the first time I’ve ever touched a ski!  I didn’t really like it.   We just did it one day.

The other thing we did was horseback riding. Well, there were two sides of the room with a little moveable barrier.   Because there were two different activities. 

The first activity was that was the boy had ropes attached to the horses and we were riding on them. The horses didn’t have saddles, they just had 2 blankets with a strap around them and then handles.  We started by taking one hand off the strap and then we wheeled our arm around, first slowly and then faster and faster!  Then we did the other arm.  Then we did two arms, wheeling around, slowly and then faster and faster.  After that, the horse started to go faster too!  It was trotting. Then we turned around on the back of the horse.   Then the horse started galloping.  Then we lay down on the horse, while it was galloping.   Then it started trotting again, then walking and then stopped.  Then the boy said “Do you know these horses?” And I said: “Yes, I do”   Then I sat with my legs on the horses neck.  Then I knelt.  Then I crouched. Then, slooowly, I stood up on top of the horse.  Then I turned around, sat down and slid down his tail! 

The second activity was just like normal horseback riding.  I had the worst horse.  Just a couple days ago it was at the doctors.  We were going around cones, turning, stopping, going, zig zags, you know!  Normal saddles and and reins…   We got to walk and trot and gallop if we wanted.   But my horse didn’t want to.  The old grammie teacher said to kick it hard and she helped me to kick it hard enough.  She grabbed my leg and slammed it into the horse three times and it went whoosh!  But only for like 10 feet and then it stopped again.    I liked horseback riding, I would like to do it again only if I had a cooperating horse!

And when we were all done riding on the horses, they took off the saddles and blankets and they left them in the training room and they could just run around with their horse friends. 

I was in a room with 5 other boys and across the hall there was a strange guy who stole things, threw one of the boys hand towels out the window and the counselors went to get it, but the counselor fell right through the metal roof of the shed!  They had to get a tarp to fix the hole and he never got his towel back.  It was awful.  So we decided to make codes to get in our room.  The first code was 100, then 150 and then 150 got told to the room across the hall.  So I said hmmmm..  on est des filletes (We are little girls!) I called this one un idee maladie  (a sick idea – sick in the sense of so awesome) and they agreed.  So we had that but we changed it to “je ne sais plus le code” (I don’t know the code anymore).  And then we said “That’s too long!” and so we changed it to “On ne sait plus” (I can’t remember) and that lasted the second half of the last day.  We didn’t just look out the door because you had to move a chair and stand on it and move a curtain over to see who was there and half the time they were too small and you couldn’t even see them.  It was too tiring.  Our code worked, and in the night we went in his room and took our stuff back.   That strange boy had cologne so we had to be wearing swim goggles when we were the guards because he would spray us in the face.  The counselors told him to stop but he wouldn’t.  I wanted to smash that produit! (cologne)  His name was Florient. 

We had a small dot on one of our walls and we threw our slippers at it to practice hitting a target.  That way if Florient came in our room we could hit him with our slippers, we also had packages of tissues to use when our slippers ran out.  But we didn’t want to attrape par le gueule (catch him by his face) we just wanted him to not steal our stuff.

I made two friends at camp. One who is called Ari.  He and I played silly chicken guy and I found another friend.  She was a girl.  She’s friends with Ari too but I can’t remember her name.  I only found her out on the last two days – because she was in a totally different room.

We had a dance party which everybody called it a boum which is pretty strange, I never heard of a boum before, but now I have.    They had YMCA, ca m’ennerve, A la queuleuleu (lining up dance)  I thought that was really fun.  I hope Daddy can find it on the computer.  (I was wondering why they didn’t have Mamma Mia!)  We stayed up dancing all the way until twelve minutes after midnight.  I helped clean up a bit.  They had to open up one of the football things because people were using pieces of trash for footballs and it all went right into the machine.  You had to pay to get a ball, and you needed francs.  Who has francs?

I liked camp, but I wish we had gone on the bikes.  Here are some some French songs from the boum!