Summit

This weekend, I went to Camp White Pine (Haliburton, ON) for a Power To Change retreat called Summit. It was a lot of fun. We left on Friday and came back today. We were supposed to be at the bus for 5:30 so that we could be ready to go at 6:00, but the bus didn't show up until 6. So we didn't end up leaving until 6:30. It was a 4 hour drive, sitting on an overcrowded (40 seats for 44 people) in the dark. It was quite the experience. Driving along the winding and hilly roads in the dark was kind of scary at some points, especially when we left the paved roads. And we were late, so we missed the beginning of the first session. But it was all good. It wasn't until Saturday morning that we could get a really look at the camp. It's a pretty nice place (although FCC's dining hall is waaay better). The area is beautiful. We had pancakes for breakfast (such a shame I had pancakes for breakfast on Friday). Then we had a session. Each session consisted of worship and a speaker. The worship band was really good and I really liked the songs they played (you should go listen to Cannons by Phil Whikham). The speaker was good too. He spoke about how life is short and eternity is long and how we should live for eternity, not our earthly lives. Saturday afternoon we made a video where we spelt out "Never the same P2C Summit" using out bodies. There I was able to see my friend who I worked with in the kitchen this past summer, it was nice to see her again. Then we had free time with activities running. My friend (the one that I went with) and I went to archery. I did pretty good if I do say so myself, I hit a bullseye and a hanging balloon. Then we sat on the dock and took a lot of pictures because it was so beautiful. The camp is kind of on a point, so they have a lot of "lakefront" property (they have 3 separate docks). We went on one of the smaller docks that was in the shade. It was beautiful weather all weekend. On Saturday it was actually too hot. I would even go so far as to say that this past weekend was warmer than the summer. Regardless, it was beautiful. The trees are just starting to change colour, so there's such a range of colour in the trees. A big part of meal time was the different campuses cheering. McMaster was probably one of the better cheerers. Brock was also pretty good, especially since they didn't have a ton of people. We had some good ones, but Waterloo has a bit of a reputation of not being good a cheering. Luckily, we had the most people, so our numbers kind of made up for it. But it was a lot of fun to cheer about how great your own school is. And then usually at the end, someone would start the "We. Are. All best friends. We are all best friends." cheer. Because we do love each other. The dessert for dinner was one of the highlights of the weekend: it was a giant homemade ice cream sandwich. It was so good. In the evening we had another session and then extended worship (probably one of my favourite parts of the weekend). There was a ball hockey tournament going on, and we watched the final game (Western won). There was a campfire, but my friend and I decided to call it a night. This morning we had a mini session and then broke off into seminars based on what we wanted to learn about. I went to one about how to keep God as your priority. It was good, very practical. All of the talks were very practical and directed towards university students, so that was nice. The bus ride back was much more pleasant than the drive up, but still not great. We took the highway this time, so that made it smoother. Overall a great weekend. They mentioned missions trips, and so I want to see if a missions trip will count towards the international volunteering part of my GEC.