By Brian Rafferty
Sitting on the steps of our cabin, staring up at the stars, working on a bottle of French Merlot, I was finally starting to feel rested.
After all, it had been a busy Saturday for the three of us — me, my wife, Christine, and our daughter, Emma.
It had just been the evening before that we were stuck in traffic on the Hutchinson River Parkway headed up to a vacation retreat in Connecticut that was supposed to be just an hour and 45 minutes away. The car was cool, but people were pulled over on the side of the road, yelling at their overheated cars. Children had dour faces and husbands and wives were snipping at each other.
But in our car, we saw the calm that lay ahead. We knew that it was only a matter of time before we would get to Club Getaway, a summer camp for adults and families in Kent, Conn.
The idea of going to camp had always been one of mixed feelings for me — joy and apprehension, excitement and fear.
I first went to sleepaway camp when I was 5 going on 6. I have three older brothers who also went there, so Camp Hatikvah, a YMHA camp in Livingston Manor, N.Y., was willing to let me come even though I was a little young.
I continued to go to Hatikvah through the summer I turned 9, and then I decided I didn’t want to go anymore. The camp was great and the activities were wonderful, but it was just a little too much of a Zionist training ground for me. Many of the counselors would talk about joining the Israeli army, the rabbi who ran the camp would talk to us about the importance of the Torah, the forced 10-mile hike every Wednesday was to get us ready for military service, and attendance at schul on Friday evening was mandatory.
Yes, I am Jewish, but I was not raised in the temple, I did not have a Bar Mitzvah at 13 and my parents never pushed the religion on us. Hatikvah, where we would all gather at the flagpole in the morning to raise the Israeli flag, was just a little too much for me.
So I read through the ads in the back of The New York Times Magazine and found a great-sounding place — Camp Hi-Rock, located just outside Great Barrington, Mass.
From the summer that I turned 10 to my year as a counselor at the age of 16, going to camp had become something I always looked forward to. The kids were different from the ones I knew at home, I made great friends that I would see each summer, I could spend the majority of my eight-week stay in the water, and I always came home with a great tan.
I am now more than twice as old as I was when I last went to camp, but I have never forgotten the experiences I had.
A few years ago a friend of mine told me about a great time she had at a place called Club Getaway. They had great singles weekends, and she and her boyfriend would go for the swimming, the water skiing, the tennis and the relaxation. She had been a camper as a kid and said Club Getaway reminded her of those summers from years ago, but without food fights, bullies and aggressive counselors.
The thought of Club Getaway stuck in my head since the first time I heard of it. How good could it be? I wondered. Is it really like camp was — with bug juice, scheduled activities and shared bathrooms — or is it more of a resort with a camp-like feel?
What I found was that it is a good mix of the two.
Club Getaway is an old camp that was probably founded in the ’40s or ’50s and has since been renovated to house a different type of camper. The large cabins, which probably housed between 12 and 16 kids each, have been subdivided into private units, each with their own bathroom.
Christine, Emma and I stayed in one of the Lakeside cabins. There was a second family in the same building, with a separate entrance, but we had all the space we needed. Three twin-size beds still left plenty of floorspace, and there were also two night stands, a closet and, perhaps most important for the summer, a couple of fans.
Breakfast (in the dining hall) and lunch (under tents with picnic tables) were served buffet-style, with a great variety of standard dining hall fare, serving stations and healthy choices. Dinner was back in the dining hall and served family style. Each dinner started with a salad at the table, and after that course was complete the wait staff brought out family-sized trays with entrees and side dishes. Friday night was chicken in an herb lemon sauce with pasta and vegetables and Saturday night was prime rib with onion rings and baked potatoes. Also, there was an enormous salad bar and other hot entrees at a buffet.
And there were dozens of bottles of wine — chardonnay on the chicken night, merlot for the prime rib.
The size of the meals was reminiscent of my old camp days — you needed to eat a lot because you were so active during the day you had to have more calories to get you through.
Take Saturday, for example. After breakfast, Emma went off with a group of kids her age to play and do arts and crafts. Christine and I went for a canoe ride around the lake, and when we got back we headed to the challenge course to take a zip line ride that literally goes from near the entrance of the camp almost all the way to the waterfront.
After Christine’s ride, we got Emma and spent the next hour or so teaching her how to swim. After lunch, Christine went for a trapeze lesson while I played with Emma in an enormous kids section. We went back into the water afterward, on the water slide, floating on inner tubes and Emma had more swim lessons.
After dinner, there was a series of games held on the basketball courts next to the boathouse, followed by a show and dancing in the boathouse (which looks less like a place to hold boats and more like a nightclub, including a full-service bar). Emma, who normally goes to bed at 8 p.m., was out dancing until 11 p.m., and we walked over to a bonfire on the beach afterward for s’mores and singing before Emma hit the hay at nearly midnight.
Which left me and Christine on the porch, working on our leftover Merlot from dinner, amazed by the day, by the beauty of nature, by the great time we were having and by the sense of peace and relaxation that was slipping over us.
And again, as when I was a kid, I’m already looking forward to going back next year.
