Childhood memory dump:
Many years ago, my family would go to this thing called “Invest Camp” every summer holiday.
We went because my parents were in this… business related organisation thing? I don’t know what it actually was. I was too young to understand that sort of stuff back then. I just remember that all the members were Polish, so that’s something.
‘Invest Camp’ in question was this yearly 3-day event where they’d just stay somewhere and have a few meetings. They organised things, like putting bouncy castles outside, to entertain the kids, but most of the time we were alone while our parents were all at said meetings.
There were two different places they held the camp in at different times. The first was far longer ago. It was far more outdoorsy and natural. We stayed in cabins and there was a small forest nearby. The best part about that was how every night we’d have a barbecue over campfire on the edge of the woods. I had so many sausages and marshmallows.
That place for it to be held was veeery long ago. I think the oldest I was going there was around 7? My main memories there are the campfire barbecues and that one time I fell backwards off a swing and almost broke my spine. Another time, my parents let me take this massive bag to take all my plushies, but I forgot to take it with me.
The second venue was this old school. To make us more excited about going there, our dad convinced us it was Hogwarts. Instead of staying in cabins, we had dorms. I spent hours in the library there reading books.
My main specific memories from the school venue were these three, which I have just dubbed “The Critter Incidents”
Incident 1 was the Wasp Incident. Once, a gigantic wasp (could’ve definitely been a hornet. It was huge) flew into my family’s room at the same time I was going inside. When I saw how humongous the wasp was, I simply screamed and slammed the door to go run away and tell my mom.
The second incident was the Caterpillar incident (this is the only one that didn’t involve a real animal). We had sleeping bags with us for some reason, so me and my often mentioned bro, LochNessMango, decided to take them out to where the adults were chilling, and crawl around in them pretending to be caterpillars. Naturally, our mom sent us back up and yelled at us for getting the sleeping bags dirty and being idiots.
Last but not least, the Squirrel incident. LochNessMango and I were walking back to our room together, returning from the bouncy castles, when suddenly, a dumpster on the way started shaking. We got really scared and braced ourselves… but it was just a squirrel in the dumpster. I swear this feels like it’s straight from a movie. You know, the “scary noise and/or big shadow is just a tiny little animal and there’s nothing to be afraid of” trope.