Twin Lakes Christian Center

Today we (LAUNCH) went to Twin Lakes Christian Center (TLCC) in northwest Iowa to visit their camp.
TLCC was started back in the 1950's when the Covenant churches decided they wanted their own camp.
They have 65 acres near Manson, Iowa of quite flat, windy land. They are situated on a lake (with another smaller one close by, hence the name), and can hold up to 200 people at once. The biggest draw to Twin Lakes is the lake that they are connected to. They utilize the lake very well all year long with sking, tubing, and wakeboarding in the summer along with a couple slides. In the winter they use the lake for toboganning, skating, and probably coolest of all, kiting. Now, kiting is way cooler than it sounds. It's not just a regular kite but one of the ones that will pull you along when you're on a board or skis. Actually it can pull you a little bit even if you're just standing on the ice; I know. It happened to me today!
The atmosphere of Twin Lakes is much different than that of Hidden Acres, and one of the things that lends to the difference is the fact that there are many different vacation homes placed around the lake. Most of the homes are not occupied during the year, but when they weekends in the summer hit, they are packed along with the lake. They really don't crowd the lake that much during the week when camps are going on, but TLCC does run a wakeboarding camp on the weekends, and that can get a little interesting. But the vacationers are also helpful because some of them choose to send their kids or grandkids to day camp at TLCC, or some of the older gentlemen who don't have all that much to do will volunteer to mow the grass just to have something to do! And sometimes TLCC will drum up some more business from the community when they open their espresso machine to the vacationers.
A couple ideas we could plagiarize from them are perhaps putting an indoor climbing wall in somewhere in our facilities or coming up with some decorations to match the theme for the summer or having a set decor or ambience for our facilities like at Twin Lakes everything is very rustic and barnish.........yeah, it's cool! Overall I really enjoyed TLCC, and I would love to go back some day!