the green spot blog

Something that is getting to be a tradition for us at Camp Evergreen is our annual trip to Vancouver Island that we do with German Volunteers. Something different for this year...we added a Kiwi! No, not the fruit...Emily, our staff from New Zealand. Two Totems are best! This trip is a way that we can say thank you for volunteering for the year. It was a bit of a whirlwind trip as we left the day before Good Friday and returned late, late the day after Easter Monday. It is always very fun to show these young Internationals the beauty of Western Canada. It's also a good reminder to me not to become blind to what makes our piece of Creation so unique and special. From the subtle, yet significant, differences in the mountain ranges to the stark differences in landscape on the Island. Giant trees and trees that grow out of dead stumps to everything green that grows on, well, everything in coastal BC. After a full day of driving, our first stop is Vancouver. Granville Isla...

I love our German Adventure Days. It's a time we carve out in our schedule to take our German volunteers on some kind of adventure as a way to say thank you or honour them for their service here at camp. It's like when we take them to the Coast . Horseshoe Canyon Yesterday we adventured to Drumheller which is one of my favourite places to go in Alberta. I love the Badlands and the Royal Tyrrell Museum. I also love learning new things - I get all these questions...like why is the museum called what it is? I know the Tyrrell part but why Royal...well - our Queen apparently visited the museum and it was renamed to the "Royal Tyrrell Museum". Who knew that our Queen dug dinosaurs! Some pretty impressive acrobatics from Hanna, Mirjana, Miriam and Daniel! We started out at Horseshoe Canyon which is the most amazing starting place. You can't see the canyon...even when you park facing it - it isn't until you get out that you see how cool it is. A collective ...

Last week was an adventure! If you didn't catch it on our Facebook page, we took our German Volunteers to Vancouver Island. And we're back! We number the same as when we left for Vancouver over a week ago so I guess that means we didn't lose anyone! You would think that keeping track of them is an easy job but when you've got three or four staff of any kind going different directions, jumping in oceans and mountain lakes, climbing trees and exploring the big cities...I will admit - there were moments when I questioned if we were going to come back with the same number we departed with! It was a very fun trip full of thousands of kilometers, lots of swimming, and beautiful weather. That's right, after spending a couple days trying to prepare our Germans for rain and clouds...we got beautiful blue skies nearly the whole time. I guess we brought the Alberta sun with us! As you can tell from some of our photos - it certainly wasn't dull travelling wi...