Games Without Frontiers

Football, Soccer, Ping-pong, Gockey.

Name a game and we pretty much played it during our school’s three-day retreat to the mountains last week.

And that was just during our “free” time.

There was not shortage of activities, which made for some great father/daughter bonding time.

She beat me in Tetherball.  By cheating.

I beat everyone in Ga-Ga, three times.  By getting lucky.

We lost as a team in Ping-Pong.  By two points.

After two action packed days, the trip was coming to an end, but not without the finale: 

• Eco-Stratego, Mini-Survivor meets tag meets hide-and-go-seek

Here are the rules -- two teams hide in the mountains... each player represents an animal...  one player on each team is the sun.

Find the sun and you win.  

Along the way, if you run down someone from the other team, tag them, and exchange your rank.

Spider beats fly.  Human beats lizard.  Bear beats Lion or is it Lion beats Bear.

Rule book please.

As you might imagine, this is serious business, especially for the counselors.

So serious, that the sun gets a bodyguard with him, usually a low-ranking animal like a flea or something.

In game one, it took our team a little while and a lot of manpower, but we finally tracked down the sun and brought home the win.

Game two was a lot more challenging.

Our Stratego strategists once again did a masterful job of hiding our sun in our zone, but this time so did the other team.

So good that we had to call it a draw when the game went too long.

The bell rang, signaling for everyone to come back to home base.  

The game and the trip were officially over.

Within minutes, we had all gathered for a closing group picture.

Minus two people -- the sun and the bodyguard from the red team.

At first it was no big deal.

30 minutes later, no one was too concerned.

60 minutes later, it was a different story.

By this point, the school bus had arrived and was packed up, ready to take the kids back to school.

All the kids but two.

Nobody seemed too worried on the outside, but I must say that my heart was beating a little faster than usual.

Maybe it was the altitude or maybe it was the fact that I used to work in local news.

The two missing kids were not from my group, not from my cabin and not from my Eco-Stratego team, but at this point none of that mattered.

What if?  

I know chaperones are always supposed to be encouraging and optimistic, but WHAT IF?

We were approaching the 90-minute mark without hearing a word from the boys.

A car had already been sent to search for them, megaphone and all.

The result was nothing.

Thankfully the weather was perfect and we were in the middle of the day, but I must say, my mind was really wandering.

The two missing boys were no longer a bodyguard and a sun, they were just two sons.

I couldn’t help but think of the conversation between the school and the kids’ parents.

The bus left with two missing seats and headed home to get everyone back on time.

Everyone but them.

One of the teachers waited to drive them home separately.

Hopefully.

Once it was determined that the boys would not be coming back on their own, a group of about 10 adults headed into the mountain for a search and rescue mission.

For about 15 minutes, we hiked up and down, right and left, shouting their names every few seconds.

I must’ve covered several football fields when I heard a scream echoing through the hills.

“WE FOUND THEM.”

By this point, I wasn’t sure if I was hearing things, but I sure liked what I thought I was hearing.

Sure enough, the boys had been found.

Here comes the sun had never sounded so good.

Apparently, they had unintentionally moved beyond the boundaries of their zone and had found a hiding place where they would not be found.

By anyone.

Within minutes the boys had returned to the lodge and smiles had returned to our group.

Mission accomplished.

We had found the sun.   The game was over.

Extreme Makeover

For those of you that have read my blog since Day 1 (or even Day 11), you know that I am Jewish.

And other than perhaps some of my rebellious brethren from the good book, this just in, Jews don’t hunt.

Or fish.

Or camp.

Ok, maybe some do, but I don’t.

Don’t blame me, it was the way I was raised.

I was also raised that there is nothing more important than family and now as the parent of three, there is nothing more important than the kids.

I guess that explains why I just went on a three-day camping retreat with my daughter’s school.

To some of you diehards, it may not have been camping by definition, but the combination of mountains, cabins, sleeping bags and 56 seventh graders, qualifies for me.

In plain and simple english, it was a GREAT time.

Great father/daughter bonding time.

Great getaway from the real world time.

Great time.

This is the second straight year that I’ve been a chaperone on this school trip.   Last year we went to one part of our state.  This time we went to another.

The days are filled with a bunch of activities from orienteering to canoeing to hiking. 

Did I mention that I was Jewish?

On Day 1, I pretty much played spectator, watching the kids climb up a bunch of trees, with a harness of course, and then proceed to do things I would never consider.  

Not even when I was 13.

My daughter asked me to try it.  I turned her down.

The instructor offered.  I declined.

My daughter said puh-leeeeeeeeze.   I said, no thank you.

Just like I did last year.

And like last year, I couldn’t have felt more guilty.   Other parents were doing it, just not me.  

Talk about middle school peer pressure.

I was somewhere between really nervous and really not interested.  Honestly, probably more of the second, but still plenty of the first.

I had no interest in walking across a tight rope about 30 feet above the ground.

I had no interest in pulling myself up a series of six wooden planks, each plank about five feet higher than the previous one.

And I had ABSOLUTELY no interest in doing “the leap of faith”, where you climb 20 feet up a tree to a wooden platform that you then jump off of into mid-air, hoping that your rope and harness do their job.

You can call me any name in the book, but it wouldn’t hurt more than the guilt I was feeling for letting my daughter down.

I apologized.

Like I did last year.

She said it was no big deal.

Like she did last year.  
But you and I know better.

I don’t know if I was the only parent to take a pass, but I do know that I was the only parent that mattered to my daughter.

But give her credit, she NEVER made me feel bad.  I did it all on my own.

Day two was all about indoor rock-climbing.  On a beautiful wall, more than 40 feet high.

Another sport I’ve never really thought much about.

I sat there for nearly 90 minutes watching the kids go up and down the wall, side to side, having a blast.

With just a short time left in the session, the instructor turned to me.

But before she could get the question out, I said, “YES,” without one ounce of hesitation.

Why?  I have no idea.

I guess I realized that enough was enough.

Did I want to climb up a rock wall?   N to the O.

But unlike this blog, it was not all about me.

As I squeezed my size 11 feet into the size ten shoes, the biggest they had, I took a glance across the room at my daughter’s face.

She was somewhere between excited and scared to death.

By this point, she had about zero percent faith in my ability to be an extreme athlete.

And why would she?  I’d never even tried before.

Until now.

I jumped into my harness and headed to the wall.

Putting one foot in front of the other, I went from 0-40 feet in about forty seconds.  

A world record, probably not.

A Jewish record, perhaps.

Either way, to see the smile on my daughter’s face was all worth it.

For the first time in two years, my daughter’s dad was not a wuss.

Bungee jumping, here I come.