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Viking Daze

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After all the days of rain, YA and I couldn’t wait to get out into the yard and get dirty.  I decided that it had been too long since I cleaned up the edges of the yard and boulevard along our front sidewalk.  This is a two-part job.  First I run my edger along where I think the sidewalk should be ending.  Second I sit on the sidewalk and pull up the bits that are overgrown. 

So there I was sitting on the sidewalk when a neighbor from up the street, along with her son, stopped to chat.  Since they had their dog, who is on the small size, I stayed on the sidewalk to pet the dog while we talked.  Blake (son) and I talked about llama day, which had happened at the library the week before.  Blake had been to the farm where the llamas come from and knew one of the llamas that was at the library. 

We also talked about school finally being over for the summer and I asked him if he had any plans.  He’s 10 so his short “just camps” answer didn’t surprise me; I followed up with “what kind of camps this year”.   He mentioned a science camp and a viking camp.  I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know all the kinds of camps there are, but a viking camp seemed different.  I asked if it was a football camp or some kind of history camp.  He laughed and said “BIKING”.  If I’d had any liquid, I probably would have snorted it up on the spot.

When I was a kid you just hung around the neighborhood for the summer and bothered your mother.  Maybe if you knew someone who knew someone you might end up at a vacation bible study camp for a few days.  If kids were doing organized anything, I never knew about it.  So even though Blake will be biking for one of his camps this summer, I love the thought of viking camp.  Not even remotely sure what we would do at viking camp, but I’m positive I would love the outfits!

How did you spend your summers as a kid?  Any camp you WISH you could have gone to?

39 thoughts on “Viking Daze”

  2. Sherrilee, it’s not too late. There’s a Viking reenactment group you can join:

    https://www.vikingencampment.com/#:~:text=The%20Viking%20Encampment%20is%20an,spirituality%20within%20the%20viking%20culture.

    When I was a kid we didn’t do camps. We got on our bikes and disappeared for the day. Sometimes we would ride down into the woods that edged the railroad tracks or we would ride over to Wirth Park to explore and collect golf balls (sometimes ones in play).

    When my parents bought lakeshore and built a small cabin and then several neighbors at home did likewise I would spend most of my summer there.

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    1. It occurs to me that I don’t actually know very much about Vikings. I mean, I know about Leif Ericson and long ships and I know they didn’t really wear those hats with horns on them. But looking at the reenactment, it looks like a lot of the stuff they do has to do with the battles and warfare. My guess is that there was a whole lot more to Vikings than that and maybe this is another rabbit hole I don’t need to go down… but probably will.

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        1. I found a book at the library written by an archaeologist. A bio-archaeologist apparently. We’ll see what she has to say.

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  3. Yes, a lot of us had mothers who were at home to bother during the summer. I remember riding bikes to a playground, and just hanging out in each others yards, playing Roy Rogers which sometimes ended us up on neighbors’ porches.. Then there were those three summers in the Trailer Court.

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  4. Lots of baseball, playing board games on rainy days; outside games like Army, kick it and run, hide-and-seek, whiffle baseball, bike rides, going to the neighborhood park to participate in all the park programs, swimming lessons, picnics, then canoe trips w/Dad after he built his canoe, reading, visiting the grandparents (both sets in town less than two miles away),

    I remember getting shooed out of the house a lot by Mom because I was bored (“Go outside and play if you’re bored!”), but in reality, I don’t believe I was bored very often as a kid. But 95% of it was unstructured play, for which I am eternally grateful. KIds today don’t know how unlucky they are not to be allowed to be kids very often.

    Chris in O-town

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    2. my mom is loving, but she is also a no nonsense woman. My sister and I learned very early on to never complain in front of my mother about being bored. Because sure as shooting, within a minute of the word “bored” coming out of your mouth, you had a chore to do.

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      2. My mother employed that strategy also. We had a playroom in the basement, and if I was ever bored, I was invited to clean and organize the playroom. From that I learned to find my own entertainment. I believe that was the point.

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  5. I also remember picnicking with my folks – Storm Lake IA had some beautiful parks right on the Lake. My mom had grown up with six siblings during the Depression, and one of Grandma’s survival tactics was to get everyone out of the house on Sundays – they would have picnics at Sioux City’s Stone Park. My mom just continued the tradition.

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  6. I went to Lutheran Bible camps in the summer. The best was a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters. Our children went to Concordia Language Villages. Daughter also went to Suzuki Summer String camps. The best of those were in Montreal. We got to go with her.

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  8. Rise and Shine, Baboons from JacAnon

    I remember summers as a lot of freedom similar to what was described by Bill, although I don’t think I wandered so far on my bike and I know I did not collect any golf balls in play. We had many overnight sleepovers with friends, sometimes in a tent in our yard, trips with Uncle Jim and Aunt Donna (both day trips and weeks long trips) and staying with cousins. It was very fun. My favorite summer activity, though, was Church Camp in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Those Methodists knew how to entertain kids and early teens while hammering home a bit of religious education. I do not remember it as overbearing at all. It was just pure fun, along with a lot of access to a swimming pool. I would babysit and mow the lawn for months to earn the money to pay for my week at camp.

    The summer I was age 13 years (1967), my mother went away for six weeks, returning only on weekends, to the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, to take some classes for her Masters in Education. I was left in charge, although Dad was home, too and he was the ultimate authority from his wheeled throne (the wheelchair). Harry the neighbor was on call, as were my aunt and uncle. They checked on us daily. I did the cooking and cleaning, as well as supervision of my brother and sister, then 10 and 7 years. Looking back on it, I was surprisingly competent. There was little trouble until mom came back home and her lieutenant (me) was unwilling to give up her power. There was no “thank you, you did a good job” which I wanted to hear. Conflict ensued.

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      1. I learned to cook early to help out, and so I never had to eat liver and onions. I refused to cook or eat that, so if I cooked a meal it was never that dish. Pre-emptive cooking, I think! I know by 13 I had mastered scrambled eggs, bacon, pancakes, corn meal mush, spagetti and red sauce with meat, hotdogs, grilled cheese sandwiches with Velveeta cheese (ick),hamburgers, tuna casserole, and fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy. I probably could do a beef roast, too, but I am not sure. I had a Betty Crocker Children’s Cookbook that I used for some things, as well.

        I also made dad’s coffee in this old, aluminum drip coffee maker. We had to pour boiling water into the upper level of the pot to drip through to the bottom. I shudder to think of it. But none of us ever burned ourselves.

        Jeannette Walls starts her memoir, “The Glass Castle” with a story about boiling hotdogs at age four and setting herself on fire.

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  9. YA was a summer daycare kid as well as a camp kid. For all the years she was in scouting, she did girl scout camp – horse camp twice. She did a wizard camp once, although I think I was more interested in it than she was. Zoo camp a few times. And, of course, gymnastics camp repeatedly.

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      1. I thought so too. It was right at the time when the Harry Potter movies were coming out. YA was not singularly impressed. The one thing I remember her saying was that the wand-making was pretty lame.

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  10. Except for the one girl scout camp I’ve already told you about, I was never at a summer camp. Didn’t need to be. We lived right across the street from a large park that offered plenty of opportunity for fun activities. Beyond the park was the sound, an arm of the Baltic Sea, where you could while away the hours swimming, building sand castles, fishing or shrimping, skipping stones or just basking in the sun.

    Our neighborhood had a posse of kids ranging in age from four to sixteen; eight of them were girls my age or within a year or two. There was always someone to play or do something with. Also, this was a time when a lot of mothers didn’t work outside of the home, and most of us felt perfectly welcome in each others’ homes. My home was the exception to that rule. Kids of all ages avoided our house because of mom’s well known anger control issues.

    Later on, when we moved to Lyngby, there were lots of kids in our neighborhood as well. Our street ended in a cul-de-sac, good for impromptu ball games, roller skating, hopscotch, hula hoop contests, jumping rope, or doing bicycle tricks. We’d all ride our bikes together to the beach which was about five miles away, the teenagers watching out for the younger kids, both on the ride there and while swimming.

    I’m amazed that, despite the physical abuse I suffered throughout my childhood, my memories of that time are predominantly happy ones.

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    1. “A posse of kids.” I know exactly what you mean. Our neighborhood contained several large “Posses” of various age groups. The younger boys in our town were known for throwing green apples at other posses, as well as at cars. My brother has confessed to this.

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  11. My daughter just reminded me that last week she and her husband and her two kids were at four different bible camps last week.

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  12. I went to Girl Scout camp once and gymnastics camp once. Both were memorable for different reasons. In Girl Scouts I learned the song “Barges” in Owatonna, then went to camp with the Faribault Girl Scouts. I sang it the way I’d learned it but the Faribault girls sang it a little differently. It worked out well but you should never be “different” as a young teen. I sang a descant to their melody. It surprised us all but I kept singing it the way I’d learned it. Suddenly all the flashlights around the campfire were on me. In retrospect, it sounded nice. At gymnastics camp I got really sick. I might have had swimmer’s ear. I had a terrible ear infection. I woke up to vertigo. I couldn’t even get out of bed. The camp finally called my parents but they didn’t want to come get me. They said I’d get better. Finally, days later, after being on the sidelines watching all the gymnastics, they came. I was really sick.

    My brothers and I had a childhood similar to what Bill described. We roamed a large area on the northwest edge of Cannon Lake. We’d ride our bikes partway, then leave the bikes somewhere and go exploring. There was the causeway around the lake, the bridge, the lakeshore, a large pond, a woods, Mr. Christie’s pasture where my horses were, and the old dance hall Jewett’s Point. There was the entire dead-end line of cabins up the hill from our house. We just explored, climbed trees, built forts, caught frogs, and rode our bikes. When we weren’t doing that, we were swimming. I was a good distance swimmer and the lifeguard for the high school boys’ swim team at 14. There was no girls’ swim team when I was in high school. I wasn’t a fast swimmer anyway. Later, my brother Kurt swam on the St. Olaf swim team. We were lucky to have the freedom we had and lots of unstructured time.

    On Saturdays we had to do work. Our parents really put us to work. I did all the housecleaning including my mom’s vacuuming which had to be done in rows, eight times per row. That was torture as I got older and watched the neighborhood girls swim out to the raft and lay in the sun as I vacuumed in rows, eight times. My brothers mowed and trimmed, and learned to change the oil in the car.

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  13. At night the neighborhood kids would come to our yard and we’d all play hide and seek. This was one of my favorite things. It was fun to be out goofing around in the dark.

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  14. I wish I could have gone to Viking camp. All of that raiding and storming of castles might have been fun.

    the only camps I went to were Boy Scout camp one summer and church camp 2 summers. These things only lasted a week each. Viking camp sure would have been funner.

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    1. A lot of the viking raids were for the purpose of plundering churches, so I guess a viking summer camp’s activities might include raiding bible camps.

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  15. I spent a lot of time in Woodlawn Park, Moorhead. Some supervised games but mostly kids doing their thing. I did build a lot of clay dams on the little creek that eventually flowed into Red River.

    Camps were too expensive for my parents to handle.

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  16. I went to church camp for maybe two or three years. I liked the singing. I can’t remember much of what it was we sang, though. One of the songs was Lord of the Dance.

    Then we make lanyard crosses, like all good Lutheran children do.

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  17. primarily headed down the street to the school where they had play time every day. Box hockey, feather ball, 4 square, craft still like making puppets and coloring or painting pictures , also lots of time wandering in the woods and river bottoms, baseball, rummy, and day camp where they taught you to build campfires identify trees and critter prints pick berries build shelters do scavenger hunts learn bird calls,

    my boys went to Viking football camp. don’t think Leif Erickson camp would have done it but Ari and I were wandering in a park by the lake and ran across the remnants of a camp where the kids build a village using 2x4s cardboard like refrigerator box’s paint and markers for drawing doors and windows Ari went wild . We played for a couple hours crawling up and down

    cool idea for occupying multiple days of construction design set design

    my kids went to theater camp, karate camp sports camp art camp music camp, swimming camp, nature camp it I think Anna sending her daughter to circus camp has to be the best

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