cloud appreciation shoe golf (what?!)

So this, very possibly, is my favorite thing about camp. Really. We used to call it "gumbo." It's the magic of just winging it - taking some hackneyed, standard, tired game and making it quirky and weirdly non-competitive and therefore interestingly super-competitive and fun. It's the last full day of the session, third session (so everyone on the staff is tired and dragging a little before the final push of the final session), and here's your Outpost VC and one of his counselors, with a group of kids, lying on their backs in the middle of the field. What are they doing? Well, they say, we've taken two weird Frost Valley activities and we've merged them. One is "Cloud Appreciation" and the other is "Shoe Golf." Cloud appreciation is typically a euphemism for lying on your back in the sun and watching the clouds go by - and sometimes entails telling the others what formations you see in the clouds. In short: doing nothing much. ("Sun appreciation," its sister sport, is just lying in the sun. Or, in the old days: tanning.) Shoe Golf entails loosening your shoe and flipping it like a horseshoe or a chip shot toward some "hole" (usually a frisbee set in the grass about 40 feet away). What you see in this video is "Cloud Appreciation Shoe Golf"! I love it. I really do. Inventive and fun and completely ridiculous, and yet they were so into it.

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