San Onofre State Beach, CA

What an amazing week!!!
After planning and preparing and learning and making mistakes, we embarked on our week long camping trip to California. We drove halfway, stayed the night in Utah and drove again the next day. We had 11 high school kids and 7 leaders. We camped at San Onofre State beach, near San Diego. We spent nearly the entire week on the oceanside. We surfed, swam, sunned, and just hung out with kids. It was beautiful!!!

Throughout the week we had several speakers come and talk about living out your faith with the kids. Instead of devotions each of the kids signed up for several one-on-one times throughout the week with the leaders when we could just talk with them about the trip, their lives right now, and where they are with God. They responded really well to this and I think that God was really working in the situation. It was cool to take a group of kids from the mountains, out of their comfort zone, to the ocean. They really change in new situations and they bonded. What was also cool was that this group of kids was different from those that came to Mexico so we got an oppurtunity to bond with and relate to different kids on that level. We went one afternoon to one of the leader's sister's house and swam in the pool. On the last day we suprised the kids with a trip to Disneyland. Which was fun for us too :)

It was quite the adventurous trip. We made some pretty significant programming and planning mistakes, like forgetting cooking equipment, miscommunicating with our team, and forgetting to think things through completely. But what kind of learning experience would it have been if everything had gone perfectly? The youth director, in watching us plan this trip, intentionally let us make some mistakes so that we could learn from them. It was cool to hear him say, at the end of the week, that it was good for him to see us scramble a bit and then come together as a team and work things out. It was such a wonderful learning experience. And how amazing that my job led me to the ocean for a week!!!