Thursday, July 29th, 2004

by the Writer's Guild of Wunderland

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• Ember Update: Assateague, Cabin, Peaches, Potomac
• GinohnNews: Happy Death Day to You...
• Zarf's Alternate Aquarius Artwork Ideas
• Chris Burnham's' Chrononauts Online! (Solonauts only so far)
• Gina's Vegan All Raw Summertime Fruit Pie
• Bonus HMR: The Terminal

This weekend, the three of us went to the Burgundy Center for Wildlife Studies, out in West Virginia, for a camp event called Adult Weekend. The BCWS is a wonderful nature-oriented summer camp which Alison went to as a kid and liked so much she went on to become a staffer, working there every summer for almost a decade. After grad school she had to stop, since it's hard to take that much time off in the summer when you have a day job, but now that Alison works for Looney Labs full-time, we were happy to give her the time she needed to resume working at camp. She's still there now, and won't be back for a couple of weeks (hence the gaps in the Animeld and Cool Word featurettes).

Alison is working Third Session, which started on Tuesday, but all 3 of us went out there last Friday to participate in Adult Weekend. This is something they do once each summer, and it's designed to give the grown-ups who are too old to go to the regular camp sessions a chance to have that wonderful camp experience again (even if they'd never been to this particular camp before).

As one who went to many a Boy Scout camp while growing up, I found the Burgundy Center camp extremely charming. For one thing, the classes are very small: the twin dormitories only have a combined maximum occupancy of about 32 campers. (That's the size of just one troop's campsite at a typical Boy Scout campground!) And the staff have many ways of making science and nature exciting and fun to learn about without resorting to carrots such as merit badges or lanyards full of accomplishment beads.

Alison has been raving about her experiences at this camp for as long as we've known her, and now that we've finally experienced this place for ourselves, we can only agree: it's a gem, hidden in a cove, far from our noisy world. We hope to return for next year's Adult Weekend, as this is something we'd like to make a tradition of (but we're worried it might conflict with Gen-Con next year).

Anyway, I took so many photos over the weekend -- 240 to be exact -- that I've decided to postpone making full use of them until after Alison gets home, so that she can help me with the project. (If she gets carried away, as she is prone to, it may turn into a complete e-book of some sort.) But here are a few I really liked...