May 8, 2011

A Blast From the Past!

Good evening!

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you mothers out there, or those Aunties, Sisters, Girlfriends, or Daughters who sometimes have an active mothering role to someone special in your life out there (that covers just about all of us, I think!!)!!! Today, my sweetie and I got to have a lovely visit and a great big ol’ lunch over at our mom, Linda’s place!! It was a bunch of fun!!

Happy Mother’s Day mom!!! 😉

Today, I wanted to share some of the pictures I took of Camp Kuratli up in Boring, Oregon yesterday. This is the Salvation Army camp that me and a lot of friends grew up going to every Summer. We had music camps, family camps, young adult/teen camps, and community camps. It seemed at times that we lived at camp almost all Summer long. One yea, I remember we made it home for EXACTLY 3 days all Summer, which gave us just enough time to wash all of our clothes!! I am not sure exactly how we were able to function without washing our clothes!! We must have smelled SOMETHING AWFUL!!! 😉

Here is what you see when you first get into camp. The main office is on the right, and the gymnasium, which I know we called something else, but I can’t seem to remember what is on the left of this pic.

Here is another pic of the large gymnasium! We hosted a lot of concerts here!

This is the old craft house and the stairs that all of us kids would race down to get to the shower house so we could get into the pool first during free time!!

Here is the caboose AKA Canteen (where we would wait in line to buy all sorts of candy and junk food!!)/Nurses Station – at least it was when we went there as kids. I don’t remember it quite looking so fresh, but we all sure had a fun time playing all over this thing!!! 😉

The camper cabins are all spaced out around this large loop. Here a few of those cabins.

You couldn’t really call being out at Camp Kuratli as roughing it because all of the cabins had indoor plumbing, running water, and space heaters! This place was really more like a resort for kids. 🙂 Here is some more of that loop of camper cabins!

Here is a pic of the other side of the circle, I am not sure what everything is now, but back in the day the building on the far left was the rec hall, which was where we could go during free time to play board games and stuff in case it was raining – although most of us spent EVERY free time in the pool – we figured we were already wet, so who cared if it rained??? The next building is the mess hall, and in front of that is the flag pole where we would line up every morning for revile, lowering whatever item of clothing happened to have gotten raided the night before (usually some poor camper’s underwear, of course!!), raising the American flag, saying the Pledge of Allegiance and then prayer for the meal. The next building was where the staff washed their laundry! I have no idea what that tiny building on the far left is, I don’t remember that, but it is right at the top of those stairs that you saw in the craft house pic. and a little farther to the right is where the caboose lives.

Here are a couple of pics of Merlo Field. This is up behind the circle of camper cabins, and this, for me, has changed the most dramatically since my days of going to this camp. This used to be a great open field!! Now it houses the camps swimming pools.

It sure is still beautiful though!! I know it is hard to tell, but up in this bit of forest is a very large house, and I remember whenever the campers would get really loud, the owners of the house would complain, and for some reason that made all of us campers laugh!! Like we were doing something right!! Even thinking about it now, still makes me smile! 😉

But mostly it was and is all of the lovely trees, the creek that runs through the camp, and the fact that we were right in the middle of the MOST BEAUTIFUL Oregon forest that helped make this camp special to all of us kids.

Here are a few panoramic views of the main circle, please feel free to click on these, or any of the pics to see them at full size – they are pretty large!!!