....Once we set up camp....well I'm pretty sure we helped set up camp, at least in the later years. Most likely there were many years when we would jump out of the boat and run straight to the Bradford's or the Figueroa's campsites. In the group campground the church reserved every summer there were about 12 big sites on a loop road with a parking area in the middle, an amphitheater on one side and the stinkiest outhouses in the world on the other. It was in the middle of the forest with all kinds of fun trails and was only about a 10 minute hike from the beach. Each site was large enough to hold 2-4 families and we filled most of them up every summer.

I remember when we bought our family tent. It was at a camping/outdoors store in Everett and Dad got one that was so durable, I think they still have it some 20 years later. It was beige and burgundy and big enough to fit all 5 of us, but I think we were squished pretty close together. It felt like it was huge probably because it was tall enough for my Dad to stand up straight in it. Of course, the older we got the smaller it felt. No one else had a tent like it and I've never seen another since. One summer Amy got her own tent. She had worked for months at one of those points programs where if you sell enough items you get to use your accumulated points to buy whatever you want out of the catalogue. She got herself a gray and blue single man dome tent. She set it up back a ways from the family tent and I remember she, Ang and Renee spending hours talking and giggling inside that tiny tent. It was so cool.

We had alot of traditions that we looked forward to every summer. From devotional meetings with camp songs and flannelgraphs to clam chowder cook-offs using freshly dug clams (eventually evolved into chili cook-offs) to beach game day. But my favorite tradition of all was campfire time. Every evening we would all gather in different sites and play cards or tell stories or just watch the fire, but inevitably our site would gather the largest crowd as Dad broke out the guitar. We'd sing silly songs that only Dad could remember all the lyrics to. "Crabs walk sideways and lobsters walk straight so we won't let you taker her for your mate" , "I knows it, knows it, indeed I knows it broder, I knows it, WEE, dem bones gonna rise again" , "Sweet Violet, sweeter than all the roses, covered all over from head to toe, covered all over with sweet violets" and many more. Then one year we discovered Patrick F. McManus. From then on, every year Dad would get out his clip on book light and read a chapter or two. I think we would have read more, but it took so long to get through that much for all the laughter that we couldn't take any more. Some of our favorite chapters were Strange Meets Matilda Jean, The Night the Bear Ate Goomba, and A Fine and Pleasant Misery. I can just picture it now, about 20 of us all gathered around one small fire howling as Dad squeezed out as much sentence as he could, becoming each character, before bursting into laughter, his deep voice reaching new tenor heights as he attempted to read on. I've listened to some of the stories on tape recently and I'm pretty sure I didn't get alot of the humor, but I loved when Dad read them.......

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