Welcome all readers to my wonderful blog. This post is going to be a little bit different from some of my other posts, because I’m reflecting on a trip I took!

A brief explanation

Since COVID has been a thing, our class trips have come to an echoing halt. The program that I’m a part of for school has a substantial focus on field studies (going to places to learn outside of the classroom). Usually we would’ve done a few day trips and 1 or 2 overnight trips, but the most we’ve done is walk down to the park in the rain for 20 Minutes. Just over a month ago, we where informed by our teachers that we where going on a trip! We later learned that we where going to Loon Lake Lodge and Retreat Centre, with our fellow grade 8’s and would be staying there for just over 3 days

Day one

Above is the schedule for the first day at loon lake. We went to school at the normal time, with all our luggage and we first got introduced to our Book (I’ll get to that later). We got our bags on the bus (it took a while, there 85 of us), had a quick snack and than left for the not so long drive  to maple ridge. When we got to the lake we jumped straight into the action (after a safety talk, of course). We did a nice little trail walk and scavenger hunt to get familiarized with the property, grabbed our bags and than got sorted into our cabins. I was happy to find out that I was metaphorically bunking with my great friend Dylan. We quickly explored the cabin with the other “frat house*” boys, got some delicious dinner and than headed to an early bed.

Keep in mind that through these few days, our teacher give us some very random snack breaks. They threw food at us from a balcony above a few times.

*That’s what we began to call ourselves. “Frat Boys” and the like

Day two

Day two was our first full day, and boy was it full. We started off nice and early (for teens), and most people where feeling tired from our long day prior. We had a quick breakfast and than into our morning work block. We worked on our believe in good project, which is all about self betterment and our Book. After lunch we did a very fun shelter building activity with one of the camp staff, followed by some D.I. Work (there’s and upcoming post about that). After dinner, me and some friends hung out and played some cards in our evening fun block and than where all really tired (see this recurring theme?). Straight to bed.

Day three

We all woke up on day three not feeling as well rested as would be preferred. This day was very similar to day two but the shelter building was switched for laser tag and battle archery. “Oooh, aaah.” Yes, it was as fun as it sounds. Battle archery was super cool, you have a plastic bow and arrows with foam on the end. It’s basically like dodgeball but you get to shoot your friends. This was super cool team building and an experience that I’ve never had before. Laser tag was also something really unique as to what we normally do in school. Laser tag is usually played indoors, in an arena, but we got to use some really expensive but cool tech that let us play easily outside. We basically just ran around the camp blasting the other teams into shame and disappointment. This was also a really amazing team building activity and brought the two grades closer together, which I think is really important in such a tight knit team. After dinner was party time (don’t tell the teachers). I’m only joking, we mostly just hung out in one of the cabins which had the Olympics on TV. This was really a nice way to decompress and just hang out with friends after a long day of hard working and harder playing.

Here’s some of my friends all geared up for laser tag

Day four

Day four was the last day of our excursion. We woke up the most rested of the day, notice how I did not say “rested”, just more rested than the other days. We did our last outdoor activity which was capture the flag, and that went pretty well. Capture the flag is usually fun when you have a good group of people, and it turns our (to my chagrin) that they where a pretty cool bunch of people. We had an early lunch and departed from one of the coolest experiences of my highschool career.

“The Book”

Now it’s time to explain the book that I mentioned a few times. The was a workbook of sorts, that was digitally handed out to use on the first day when we where still at the school. This book had sections to fill out different experiences or parts of the trip you liked. It had writing prompts and space to inset images. We worked on this book in our advisory time, which I didn’t mention in any of the days, but is in the schedule. Most, if not all of us had to finish this book when we just home, just for lack of time. If you would like to flip through, I recommend it. There’s some cool pictures and little tidbits of reflection on my time at loon lake

Conclusion

Overall, it was great privilege to be able to go to such a cool facility and do some really fun things. I leaned a lot about our PLP team and how we can function better as a unit. Thank you all for tuning in to this rave about Loon Lake.

See you in the next one, Declan.