Well it was billed as the one of the best weeks of your life!
On 16th Feb the Irish contingent arrived in Amsterdam, via Cork, Dublin and Belfast.
After spending the day sight seeing, we embarked on a 16 hour coach ride across The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and arriving in the Saas Valley in Switzerland.

The coach ride actually wasn’t too bad (Even for an old person like me!)
But the driver had the knack of stopping for a break just as I seemed to finally fall asleep!

From the very start everyone on the camp got on brilliantly and the atmosphere was really relaxed and awesome (We had Americans!)

In fact there were young people and leaders from all over the world including Chile, Canada, South Africa.

The Daily routine included having breakfast around 8 (ish) and then heading off to the slopes.
At the start we were on the kiddies slopes and it took most of us 3 days to get the hang of going more that 5 feet without falling.
By Tuesday we were all Pro-Boarders and going faster and falling harder, in fact at the end of every day it was the norm to have a very painful butt; however this was all forgotten the next morning when we did it all over again.

Every day we had a theme. The first day it was “Courage”.
Using this theme we looked at how it took courage for everyone to actually put the board on and stand up, knowing that you were going to fall and how courageous it was to do this time and time again.
Other days the themes were Discipline, Wisdom, Integrity and Compassion.
We finished off the day by having a leader share their thoughts on the themes and how the experiences they had on the slopes, can be related to experiences at home.
All in all was a great week and was worth all the organizing, there were lots of tears on departure and it was clear to see friendships had been made which will last a long time.
One of my highlights of the camp was when one of our young people said that they never realized that being on a church camp could be so much fun.

Mark Dunwoody.