summer of sun!

Ok so I have not blogged for like ever but now the time of information is back… sort of.

So right now I am still recovering from my summer of intense work (you will get the pun if you read it out loud) where I was camping in tents (hah get it?), playing sport in ridiculous heat and putting up marquees it ridiculous heat. Much of what I did over the summer was in ridiculous heat, whether it was really blazing hot sun heat or lots of cloud cover humid heat it was generally hot. So now I will tell all of you about what I did over the summer in a tad more detail but first to get something out the way, I have had the worst rugby watching weekend ever!!! Scotland sevens lost to like everyone (there was IRB rugby sevens on in Wellington this weekend) Scotland 15s lost to England and the Waikato Chiefs lost to the Brumbies…. Not fun!

Ok so I will take it from Christmas time. I got back from the south island safely and the next day I had a birthday party to attend and it was so much fun… on a bouncy castle. I probably lost like 10kg just on that day alone because bouncing is such hard work. So I rested for like a day then I was away to the first camp of the summer on the 31st of December! That is New Years Eve! So we had the leaders only day on the 31st and then all the campers arrived on new years day. It was a sports camp and was awesome but absolutely blazing heat the whole week. I don’t think I have ever drunk so much water and put on so much sunscreen… and I didn’t get burnt! The camp was for 15 – 17 year olds so the sport was pretty intense and competitive. Second day in I sprained my finger pretty bad and I could not play guitar! I was gutted. But the rest of the camp there was barely any injuries at all. My team did not win in the end but I think we had the most fun… with out winning. Some of the sports we played were:
Cricket
Football
Ultimate Frisbee (on the biggest field ever)
Volleyball
Indoor football
Netball
Aussie rules football (awesome game)
Touch rugby
Hockey
Softball
Mattress softball (best game ever – instead of bases you have piles of mattresses and you are out if you are in-between bases when the bowler gets the ball but if you are in the air you are fine… i.e. diving for the base)
American netball (rules of netball on an American football field and American football ball)
There is probably more but I can’t remember. So yeah that was a cool camp and I made some pretty cool friends, one of them is training with the tall blacks (the basketball team of NZ).

So then I had a three-day break (not long enough) and it was off to the second camp called Ponui Island Senior (original as). It was on an island on the east coast of Auckland. We took this big barge across and the place was awesome! It was basically a big beach where the main stuff happened. We were in tents but there was a hall and a kitchen and stuff… no real toilets. This camp was for 15-18 year olds and was really cool; it was just a really cool bunch of people. It was kind of hard being a leader when I was so close to the age of the campers but turned out alright, I just talked with a deeper voice (hah, hah someone asked if I was 26). The music was awesome at this camp and really loved the singing and stuff, but for the first few days I could not play guitar because of finger. We did loads of cool things and went on ‘tramps’ (walks) then camped out in random places, which was cool. The forecast all week was rain and not just hazy stuff like, rain of the drowning type but God must have been like “nah, not for that week” and he just let our bay (not the island) our bay be protected from bad weather and He gave us awesome weather. I was a leader in the team ‘operation cobra’ and we had the coolest little things we did and chants and stuff. On the second day we did synchronized swimming and our team won that. When I get pictures I will show you all our fabulous routine. Anyway in the end the cobras won and we were chuffed.

Ok so this is a long post so I will finish it off later. Next episode is about parachute… the biggest Christian music festival on the southern hemisphere (not that hard to achieve as there is nothing down here).

God Bless
Andrew