The 2016 Service Unit 639 Encampment is in the Books!

We just wrapped up our service unit’s Encampment Weekend.  It was a great one – albeit a little cold!  I always get a little depressed after a big event has passed whether it’s a Girl Scout weekend or a church retreat.  This song runs through my head for the next day or so until the melancholy passes.  Really, it does:

For the past two years, we’ve held our Encampment at Camp Pisgah, a Girl Scout camp near Brevard, NC and part of the GS Carolinas Peaks to Piedmont council.  It’s about an hour and a half away from our hometown, and it’s a beautiful drive – but make sure you keep your eyes on the road while winding through the hairpin turns on mountainous 276.  Pisgah is a neat camp, and I love their Harry Potter theme.  Each unit has a crest that suspiciously looks like the different houses of Hogwarts – plus one, since there are five units.  There’s a Camp Pisgah patch, and then each unit has its own that you can collect as well.  Last year we stayed in Sleepy Hollow (Slytherin), and this year – for at least one night – we stayed in the Treehouses (Ravenclaw).  Here’s the overall patch and the aforementioned two:

Pretty neat, huh?  Camp WaBak should have something like this for all of its units (hint, hint)!  Maybe something incorporating the badges they were originally named after (hint, hint)?

Anyway, we’ve been having crazy weather this past year, so of course a bitterly cold front pushed down just in time for our encampment up in the mountains!  Our Juniors came up for Friday night, and we stayed in the Treehouses unit which is a neat looking cabin up on stilts and perfect when the up to 15mph gusts in 32° nighttime air comes whooshing through the screened-in windows circling the entire cabin!  It’s like a York Peppermint Patty commercial that you wish you weren’t in!  For that extra special touch, the breeze pushes its way up through the small cracks of the hardwood floors when it’s extra gusty.  I hope I’m not making it sound like these units are run down, because that’s not the case at all.  All of Camp Pisgah’s units are in great shape, clean, and are maintained very well.  Usually you see a bunch of graffiti on the furniture and walls at camps (“J-Low was Here!”), but you really don’t see much of it at Pisgah.

But back to the weather.  I made an executive decision and took up our SU program manager’s offer of staying in the heated Lodge for Saturday night, especially since our Brownies were joining us and the temperature was supposed to get down to 26° that night.

We put on a STEM theme for the second year in a row so that we could use our cookie dough for our SU events.  Our council offers use of cookie dough for approved events about Healthy Living, STEM, or Cookie Rallies.  We try to take advantage of this option each year since opportunities to use our cookie dough are limited.

During the day, the girls rotated around areas of the camp to perform experiments and learn about the science behind them such as oobleck/bouncy balls, liquid rainbows, surface tension jars, and fizzy candy just to name a few.  I’ve said this before, but our service unit is very blessed to have a few GS “retired leaders” and alumnae to run these events.  If it weren’t for them, I don’t know that we could even have SU events due to the time involved and how slammed your average leader is just from typical troop activities and paperwork.  They are an extremely valuable resource that shouldn’t be taken for granted by councils or service units.

We had a campfire Saturday night – but indoors.  Camp Pisgah’s dining hall has a large enough fireplace that we could use for s’mores cooking.  Once everybody got their fill of burned marshmallows, it was showtime!  I threw in a couple of Mystical Fire packets and talked about how chemicals exposed to heat create the different colored flames (gotta keep it STEM based, ya know!).  We turned off the lights, and I told a few ghost stories.  Just kidding!  I would never tell ghost stories.  I told a few humorous ones instead, and the favorite by far was the Neverending Story – not to be confused with the movie of the same title.  You can only pull it off one time when no one knows the punchline.  It’ll either be a huge hit or fall flat on its face.  I’ve experienced both scenarios, but this time it was a home run with everybody chanting after the third rendition.

It turned out almost EVERYBODY took up the offer of staying on the Lodge’s floors Saturday night.  Everybody was warm, but not many people got much sleep except for the few extremely loud snorers.  I may or may not have gone off on a rant about snorers on Facebook about 1am.  I believe between the cold and the snorers, I got about 8 hours of sleep total for the weekend.

Last summer, I suggested making custom patches for our SU events.  When I look back at my patches from my GS experience, the ones that are the most special to me were specifically named and dated for that event.  We made one for last summer’s City Slickers, and here is this year’s Encampment patch.  I thought it turned out pretty well!

We headed home Sunday morning.  You know what’s the best thing about Camp Pisgah?  They serve strong coffee at every meal.  Bless you, Camp Pisgah, bless you.