Summer camp for adults? Bring on the s’mores (and the rum)
By: Experience Magazine
Tags: Getaway, Reinvention, Summer Camp, Vacation

Founded in 1976, the 300-acre Club Getaway originally catered to kids. Now it offers a schedule of adult, family, and youth camp programs, with 40-plus activities, in its 89 small, bare-bones, rustic cabins. On the Saturday morning after the bus ride, the camp seems surprisingly quiet, but Schreiber isn’t concerned. After arriving and receiving their bunk assignments the night before, the 200-plus campers — who also came from Boston, New Jersey, and neighboring locations in Connecticut — had attended a welcome happy hour, a group dinner in the Mountain House, and karaoke and dancing in the Road House, which lasted until 2 a.m. Now, some people are doing morning activities, he explains; others are reading by the lake. “Some people are nursing hangovers,” Schreiber says. “It was a rowdy night; everyone was drinking and a having a good time.” A color war, a traditional camp field day competition, will be the first group activity to bring everyone together that afternoon.

All of this fun doesn’t come for free, of course. At Club Getaway, prices run from $479 per person for a quad-sleeping cabin to $850 per person for a double bunk with a drink package. If you want to ride the bus to camp, that’s another $69. This group of campers, which signed up for a Gen-X-themed weekend, varies in affluence, ethnicity, education, even coolness factor. Some could pay the fees easily; for some, the cost was a stretch.

Campers are split into four teams for the color war.

Either way, many say they’ve looked forward to returning to the kind of place they felt safe, free, and happy as children.

“I have terrific memories of camp. The friends I made were so important. I was a color war captain, and so was my husband,” says Ellen Judson, a 53-year-old marketer from New Jersey. “It’s like that here. Everyone is friendly. There’s no stress, no judgment.” Judson learned to horseback ride and water ski at summer camp as a kid. Now she yearns to do both again: “They bring me back to a time in my life when I was happy.”

Others say they’re looking to have an iconic experience — and a particular type of human interaction — they never got to try as kids.

“I’ve never been to camp,” says Erin Riddell, 50, who came by herself. “My parents didn’t have the money. But I’m pushing myself socially and physically. It’s easier for me to jump out of a 10-foot-tall tree than it is to meet people.”

“People are able to show up and say, ‘This is who I want to be here.’ You don’t get many chances to be unknown somewhere for a limited time.”

Thus far, Riddell has pole-danced, zip-lined, and even tried the trapeze. “No one talks at wine tastings,” she complains. “I’ve been on dates where they’re on their cell at dinner. You can’t be on your phone and on a zip line at the same time. You’re going to have to interact.”

Penny Harvey, a PhD sociology student at Georgia State University who worked as a camp counselor for seven years, says summer camps serve an important purpose for adolescents and adults — allowing them to escape from their day-to-day personas.

“People are able to show up and say, ‘This is who I want to be here.’ You don’t get many chances to be unknown somewhere for a limited time, and have the opportunity to be at a place where you can reinvent yourself,” says Harvey, whose master’s thesis is entitled, “It’s Camp: Summer Camp Culture, the Renegotiation of Social Norms and Regulation of Gender and Sexuality.”

“Who you try to be that summer doesn’t affect anything in real life, and it will end in five or seven weeks, so it’s this contained social experiment,” Harvey says. “I found people could express who they were without their parents or friends passing judgment.”

That experience can be a powerful draw for adults — on an intensely compressed timeline.

“Adults want to create those bonds again and recreate a camp family,” Harvey says. They want to feel close connections, forged from experience and annual rituals, “like when everyone cries at the end of camp.”