Jamboree 2008 - 30th Anniversary!

Welcome to the 30th Anniversary of the JAMBOREE!!

Ah the Jamboree! The smell of fresh air, pine trees, summer rain and 60 smelly people! That's correct 60 people, six-zero. I feel like I should just end it there. What else can you say? Relaxing probably isn't right. Circus seems to fit better! It was fun, as always, even still. Almost too warm this year though. The kids had a blast, as usual and were actually pretty easy to handle. Having the "Big Girls" around to help was key. Serena is just a sweetheart and this year her friend, Dana, was too! Emily just adores everything about them...Sigh. She wants to a big girl so bad. Having missed last years festivities due to Abigail's late arrival I can't speak to Billy's behavior last time, but this time he was a camper. Nothing seems to faze him, fires, drunks, random trailors, dogs, strange kids you name it. With the exception of the occassional "I'm hungary" he was a piece of cake. Abigail, on the other hand, has a 2 night maximum for being away from home. Two nights and it's over, no questions or explainations needed. I know this because it only took me three solid months of travel to learn. And they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks! She was great considering she finally learned to crawl days before we left and was unable to get down on the ground for the entire trip (her mom is retentive). She slept like a champ and hung out in the saucer and kept the stranger danger alarm to a quiet roar. That is until Saturday night when she decided it was time to go. She stayed up for, no exaggerating, 2 hours whaling at the top of her lungs. Over the crowd singing drunken lullabyes at the fire, over her father's attempts to offer some sort of solace, over the hushed whispers of everyone talking about what a set of lungs she's got. I must admit I was the end of my rope as well. But all is well that ends well and we were leaving in the morning anyway. I do imagine next year's Jamboree will be considerably smaller which is kind of bittersweet, but you won't hear any complaints from me! Or Russell Maynard!!