About two weeks ago, I had the privilege of going on a camping trip with 31 high school students. We roughed it out on the beach with our tents for a night and then hiked a mountain for five hours the next day. Some team-building games were thrown in there, too, along with eating a dinner comprised of any food we could scrounge up, and then breakfast and lunch the following day at a local restaurant.
The timing of this trip probably wasn't the best—we went on the trip the day after we had a huge audit of our high school—so we teachers were a bit unorganized and tired, yet the students had a good time anyway. Spending time with the students outside of the classroom always serves as a good reminder why I enjoy being a teacher. Those kids need a lot of love!
Below are some pictures from the trip. Since I don't believe in lugging cameras around, these were taken with my cellphone... so sorry if some of them aren't clear! I didn't include that many pictures of the students for safety reasons, but there are some pretty neat pictures of the beach and the mountains. China really is beautiful!
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| City kids setting up their tents. |
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Here was my tent. Never mind the fact that I had to move the tent in the middle of the
night because I staked it too close to the ocean when the tide came in. |
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| Thankfully it didn't rain, even though it looked like it would. |
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I know this picture isn't the best quality, but it
shows the beautiful full moon that we had.
No wonder the kids were crazy. |
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Instant noodles cooked over coals. The students were given a limited amount of money
and had to feed their group members (about 10 in total). This group chose noodles.
My group chose to pay a local store to scramble some eggs for us. Pretty smart! |
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| And this was taken at 5:30 in the morning. |
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| The "sunrise" at 5:30. |
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| A fishing boat heading out for the day. |
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The rest of these pictures are from the 5 hour hike that we had.
It was a pretty challenging hike! Thankfully we only had one lightly-sprained ankle. |
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| And yes, we finished our hike at the top of the rock that has nothing underneath it. |
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Some pretty foliage down below. I wasn't willing to get any closer to
the edge, though, since the drop off was steep. |
