YMCA camp

Yesterday we visited the YMCA camp near Boone, IA, and we were all very impressed. We were shown around most of their 370 acre camp by executive director Dave Sherry. They have wonderful facilities, nice new buildings, an open playing field, and a swimming pool.
I think that the thing that impressed me most about the camp is the ingenuity and creativity of the director and how that was put to good use. Everything has a thought through purpose and strategy. They are putting up benches and pavilions wherever they can so that people have a place close by to sit down and talk to encourage relationship building.
They had a waiting list, so they built a couple tree houses connected by walkways, but they built them to look like kids made them, with haphazard boards for railing. They also have the oldest campers stay in them, so when the younger kids walk by and see the older kids staying in the cool tree houses, they'll want to come back year after year, so they can eventually stay there. It'll work, I promise. I want to stay in them!
They go through 1 bus about every 5 years, and the director was getting tired of having to wash it so much because they're on a gravel road. So when they got their newest bus, he took his car out and drove around the gravel. When he was done, he scraped the dust off his car with a note card and took that to the paint store. They matched the color and now the Ycamp doesn't have to wash their bus very often.
He has a philosophy behind everything, and it all makes sense.
One thing I'd like to see implemented here at camp is the "boys will be boys" camp they run. The philosophy is that boys are boys and want to do boyishly stupid things, but they aren't allowed to in today's culture. So for one week these boys are allowed to just simply be boys. They burn things, climb things, run up and down things, blow things up, play in the mud, and they don't have to shower or change clothes if they don't want to. They get to be boys! I don't know if we should have an entire camp, but maybe just let kids go a little more crazy!