It was 8:02 p.m., the first night of the 10th-grade field trip and all the students were sitting around the campfire, ready for an exciting night. Little did they know they were in for a trip full of horrors. The mess started when the students arrived at Camp Ignite, the cabins were all flooded and half of the wood panelling was chewed up by termites. Students quickly noticed the hor-
rible conditions with the bunks being eaten and ruined by termites.
“This is honestly the grossest thing I have ever seen. How do they expect us to stay here for two more days?” Zobel said. “I hope
the activities are fun tomorrow and I hope that it makes up for the room situation.”
Walking further into the cabin, in the bathroom, sophomore Sarah Zobel and her whole advisory saw cockroaches lining the bathroom shower walls.
“It was so bad in the middle of the night a cockroach fell on my pillow and I rolled over in my sleep and was met eye to eye by the
disgusting creature,” sophomore Sophia Caputo said.
The next day, everyone woke up thinking they were going to go rock skipping, bungee jumping off the tallest cliff at the camp and go hot balloon riding. They thought they were going to enjoy their first day at Camp Ignite. But that was quite the opposite of what happened. Little did they know they were about to experience their worst memory of the school year. They played learning games and modified board games that were meant to focus on gluing, cutting out shapes and coloring in the lines. The students were stuck inside even though it was a beautiful day. It was like the counselors were a storm ruining the clear sky.
“This is miserable,” Zobel said. “ is was supposed to be a fun fi eld trip where we got to bond with our advisory, but these activities are worse than walking on a bed of nails, at this point we would have rather been back with the termites.”
The students felt like this field trip was torture. As bad as they wanted a break from school, this fi eld trip was worse than school,
making the students long for lectures and the pointless middle block. Zobel couldn’t take it anymore. That day during lunch she decided she was going to escape and go back to school. The clock hit 10:30 p.m., it was 30 minutes after curfew and the counselors and advisors were asleep. It was time for Zobel’s plan to come into place. Opening the back door she successfully left
the cabin and started walking down the camp to get to the trees right behind the main road. Running down the dark path with her duffel and flashlight, Zobel snuck into the camp supervisor’s office to try and fi nd an escape vehicle, preferably a car.
“I couldn’t find a ride out of Camp Ignite so I stole the night shift’s maintenance golf cart and hoped it would have enough power to take me back to school without running out of gas, ” Zobel said.
Zobel made her great escape in fashion, with her black leather jacket and black motorcycle driving back to school.
“I felt like I was in Mission Impossible,” Zobel said. “I just had to get out of there. I felt like a smothered kindergartener, I need-
ed to escape.”
The next day guidance counselor Christine Hempsted was alerted Zobel was missing and she started a camp-wide search for
her.
“We finally found activities that get students to want to go back to school,” Hempsted said. “I feel like we are on top of the world. We were doing it for the benefit of the students, they needed to learn the importance of school and we did what we had to do.”
