One of the great events at camp is our annual Carnival.  It’s not just great because of the bounce house rides, games and contests, the fried dough truck, the photo booths, costumes and the food and drink…it’s great because we all come together after a cookout dinner on the Upper Soccer Fields for an evening as part of the Laurel Family.  Brothers and sisters hang out with each other.  Cousins have a great chance to catch up. Camp little brothers in Apache walk from game to game with their older camp brothers in Bago. Camp sisters in Acadia meet up with their big sisters from Bec.  It’s a total relaxed and fun night, under the Maine sky… and is always remembered as one of our favorite nights of the year.

This summer, we invited Dave from the Max Cure Foundation and Laurie from Maine Camp Experience to be part of Carnival.  In the middle of our festivities, we took a few minutes and asked Dave to speak about his charity and how he formed the Max Cure Foundation seven years ago after his son was diagnosed with pediatric cancer.  Dave spoke and you could hear a pin drop.  He talked about how his son is now a healthy camper (at a New York camp) and how over the past seven years they’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to find a cure for pediatric cancer. Then we all had a blast watching our youngest Acadian and Apache Frosh participate in the Dunk Your Kicks event where we donated hundreds of pairs of sneakers collected from camp families at Laurel, Androscoggin and Vega.  It was great night and we were so happy to have Dave part of our very special evening.

It’s hard to believe three weeks of camp have gone by and we’re in our last day of the First Program Rotation already.  Tomorrow, we awake to new schedules that will take us through the next three weeks of our program cycle.  Time is flying but the very best is yet to come.