“Right now, it would take you about 1 hour 21 minutes to drive home.”

I read that message off of my phone on August 23^rd, 2014. Curiously, I was laying in the family room of the house I had grown up in, on the blue leather couch that I had sat on many, many times since we’d gotten it 11 years ago, with my cat on my lap. Yet my phone was under the impression that my home was actually an hour and 21 minutes away. Not at all coincidentally, Camp Kalsman also happens to be an hour and 21 minutes from the couch on which I was laying. After three full summers at camp, I certainly felt at home. But, just like I had left the house I had lived in my entire life to move across the country for college, I felt that it had come time for me to grow up and leave camp. So I dismissed the idea that my phone seemed to think I was supposed to be going home, and I began to come up with a bunch of new summer plans.  

In December, I decided to spend a semester studying abroad in New Zealand, starting in mid-July. So I came home from college, got a couple jobs to save up some money, and started some volunteer work. Some of the groups who rented camp needed a lifeguard, and it just so happens that I was a lifeguard in need of an extra job, so I spent a couple of my weekends working at camp, again. After about three weekends lifeguarding, the camp director, David Berkman, asked me to come up and watch his daughter for the weekend; I happily obliged. I guess I got caught up in the camp hype, because almost a month later, I’m still here. It seems as though my phone is smarter than I am – Camp Kalsman is, and always will be, home.