T-minus a week and a day until 3 of the girls and I load up the Griswold family truckster with sleepin’ bags, Dr. Bonners soap and not much else, then hit the open road. We’ll point our way towards The Hostel in the Forest, where we’ll spend two days and nights under a canopy of green/in a bubble of happy near the Georgia Coast.

I never went to sleep away camp. Growing up in Alaska, most kids didn’t go to camp, camps themselves were few and far between, and most that existed had a religious affiliation. We Last Frontier kids weren’t like our counterparts in the lower 48 who drove their parents nuts and had to be shipped off so they could have a week or two of sanity. Wait, what?

Why go to camp when the great outdoors is your backyard? When you can run out the door of your house straight into the woods and get lost in your own little world for hours on end? When you can go to Girl Scout Day Camp to learn to whittle (not like your dad didn’t teach you already) and cook on a fire pit (again, not like you don’t already know how to do this) or braid a lanyard for your mandatory Swiss Army knife (a mostly useless skill)? What’s the point when you know exactly when the salmon run, can spot and name the state bird, have the flower picking rule ingrained in you (don’t pick one unless there are ten others just like it *right there*) and moose graze outside your bedroom window at the ripe old age of 7?

The point, I suppose; is the bond with fellow campers. Next weekend, I’ll have my own make-shift-grown-up-ish version, complete with tree houses and three of the most wonderful, funny, smart, and beautiful women I know.

The Hostel in the Forest sits on 120 acres of forest and wetlands, is home to geodesic domes and 9 treehouses, 3 outdoor showers and 4 gardens. Like many other hostels, visitors participate in daily chores like sweeping porches, helping in the kitchen or feeding the chickens (see also: Miss August). After the work-has-kicked-our-azzez summer most of us have gone through (some of us with new jobs, some planning weddings, some finding our footing, some learning our brains out – all of us working ourselves to the bone), the tranquility of the Hostel will serve us well.

A day trip to Jekyll is in the plans as well, a twenty minute drive down the road on the other end of which there will be bikes rented for tooling around the island or just delivering us to the sand and the surf. For me – a visit to the Sea Turtle Center I wasn’t able to complete when The Mc and I visited earlier this year. Kelly says she wants to go with me just to hear the sound I’ll make when I see them. I think she might need to sign a liability waiver in the event I crush her eardrums or shards of glass fly and embed themselves into her skin when my squeals shatter any glass in a 1.5 mile radius.

One more thing to check off my list. What’s on your list, and what are you doing about it?