Return to Camp Ocean Pines

Last year, volunteers showed up at Camp Ocean Pines in Cambria one weekend, to help decorate an ampitheatre that had also been built by volunteers.  The staff hosted a "thank you" lunch plus tours of the camground this Sunday. The patio even included a real live scarecrow to greet visitors. And, yes, I do mean "live."

The camp is an extraordinary place, a former YMCA camp, now transformed into a multiple-use site that brings school kids from all over te county to a beautiful natural area to learn about the environment and engage in hands-on outdoor lessons.  It's also an old-fashioned summer camp with volunteers constantly raising money to offer scholarships for undrprivledged kids so they too can have that valuable camp experience.  And it serves as a base for all sorts of retreats, conferences and special creative workshops. Including a mosaic workshop that culminated in the ampitheatre decorating project.

And volunteer, hands-on help is how the ampitheatre came to be built -- a special project of a group of engineers.  When the concrete seats were done and the flagstones mounted on it, that's when the mosaic volunteers moved in to decorate the cracks with all kinds of sparklies!

Both the tops of the seats are the stairs down to the stage were flagstone with all the mosaic placed inbetween. In additon, each of the rows of seats were all color coordinated, which makes it easy to direct bunch of people who can be told they're to sit in the blue row, or the green row.

The camp is busy planning new projects, including building needed bathrooms and -- how cool is this -- they're planning a zipline to take kids zooming throught he tree tops.

All of this incredible work depends on the support of volunteers and donors to keep this program going.  If you'd like to help support their activities -- like help sponsor a kid so he or she can have a camp experience that would be otherwise unavaible to them, visit http://www.campoceanpines.org/ or call (805)927-0254.  Christmas is comming as is the IRS end of charitible donations time period.  What better gift than to give a kid a Camp Ocean Pines experience. 

Red tailed hawk in his cage, watching visitors