The day after Christmas we loaded up 34 students, along with 8 adults on a bus heading to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The trip is meant to be a retreat of sorts for high school students. One of our favorite things about the trip is that we are not involved in the planning or execution of the trip. Another YFC chaper from Alabama plans and puts on the event every year. We stay at a fairly nice hotel, and Gatlinburg is a confined tourist town where the students are pretty free to hang out and chose there activites. The activites range everywhere from mini-golf and lazer tag, to aquariums and indoor skydiving. On our way home we stopped to have a snowball fight which pleased many of the Floridian students who had never seen snow before!
Needless to say it was a fantastic trip where we got to spend a ton of time just hangin out with the students. On the way up to Tennessee I had one student tell me about what he had done the night before, (out at the strip clubs) which didn't surprise me too much but caught me off guard as he had never opened up that much before. From that moment on I knew the trip would be a positive experience where I would be able to grow the relationships that I had already established with the students. One more exciting thing to watch happen on trips like this is to se the bonds that build amongst the 3 different schools who are represented. I believe that Campus Life gets more credibility and gains momentum from the students realizing that Campus Life happens in more places than just their school, and more places than West Palm Beach, FL. All in all it was a fun, and very successful trip...I can't wait to return next year. If you are interested in seeing pictures you can look on facebook, we created a Gatlinburg 2009 facebook group where all the students have shared pictures and more!
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