Sorry, Camp gets busy

So the camp season is over and the poor Lurecrestboys site didn't get any love... and we are deeply sorry for that. We hope that you will forgive us for not being able to get any of this summer online for you... the summer season usually gets rather crazy. There are pictures of every week's worth of campers on the www.camplurecrest.org site though, so please go check them out to see all of the fun that we had. Off-season work has just begun with a bunch of retreats in sight and a new group of bible school students already on the grounds.

Here we see Bryan Irvin busy at work while the weed eater sits alone doing nothing by the grass that desperately wants to be mowed. Now that camp is over we finally have time to get caught up with the yard work as we move forward into the retreat season.

This fine young man is Chris Stewart, Big Nate's nephew, who came to work as a crosstrainer this summer. Now that the summer is over he is spending a few weeks with us before he goes back to his home in Missouri. He has been a lot of fun to have around this summer and especially the last few weeks.

These are a few of the students from the bible school this year. Yep, the school is already underway. There are 11 students this year, most of them old staff members from years past with a few who came to work just this last summer. From right to left here is Big Matt, Brendan, and the lovely miss Nikki Hiers trying to hide between the pickets. She is here at the ESBS, as well as some other familiar faces from past summers. These three are the students we have for this fall as our work duty students. So far their work has pretty much been cleaning the pool and watering plants... but today they helped us bring the blob back to life.

Yep, we fixed it, well... kind of.

So our sincerest apologies yet again for not being able to get posts out this summer. The camp sessions just are too busy and computer time is so rare, but we hope that you all can keep up with us through the year again. We'll try to have pictures of the retreats and what's going on with the ESBS throughout the year. This year it looks like Big Nate will mostly be on his own though because Jeremy will be leaving soon and Bryan won't be here after the retreat season... oh well, the fun never ends at Lurecrest.

Embryo Gator

This is our new gator... well, it was given to us for this summer to get Jerry and Charlotte around but hasn't left yet so we thought we would give it some love. This is it... essentially it's smaller than the others and kinda wimpy looking but all told it's more powerful than the baby gator. It's also bright green with yellow seats which we really enjoy. Oh yeah, and the new feature which our "trail" gators lack... cup holders.

2007 Summer Camp Staff

Sorry all for not being able to get anything up for the last few weeks. The first month of camp is always pretty crazy and we haven't exactly had the free time to get too many pictures and stories going. These are the staff from this summer... and a wonderful staff we have. Most of our support staff are returning from past years of service here at Lurecrest while he majority of our counselors are new. At this point we have just finished two weeks of having campers here... Teen week and Junior-Middle week. There are about 120 or so pictures of each week on the primary camp website if you want to see all the fun the campers were having...

www.camplurecrest.org









So this is our summer staff... we have all been having a great time so far though most everyone is worn out. Orientation was such a blessing to the staff as we bonded together as a body and got to have some good time to get face to face with Jesus. We'll have more posts this week to catch everyone up with what's going on.

New Tent?! Say What?!

These fine men are Jerry Martin (Executive Director), Steve Thompson (Chairman of the Board), and Jeremy White (Camp Director). We've introduced Jerry and Jeremy of course but Steve is the one in the center. He is now the Chairman of the Board of Trustees for Camp Lurecrest. They came up last week to decide which direction they wanted to go as far as replacing the tent. The options were either sew the old tent up (which seemed to be questionable as to whether it could be done right, build a permanent shelter (which costs more $ and takes a while), purchase a new tent, purchase a carport (ewww), or just go without (which would be lame). They decided on getting a new tent since we already had the poles and the other tent worked so well.

This was the scene of the devastation that was incurred by the wind storm we had about a month ago. The tent as we mentioned before was torn to shreds.

This is Charles Barrett who worked on staff here the summer of 2005 as a counselor in Dorm 1B. Jerry commonly refers to him as "Popeye". He came up to help us out here this week before he moves on to a job in Raleigh, where he went to school at NC State. He's been a blessing to have up here and helped us get this new tent up so we thought we'd give him some props.

Bada-Boom!!!

New Tent baby... the white looks so much classier than the yellow too... we're back in business.

Vacation

Sorry everyone but we're taking this week off and won't have a post up until this next week... but this summer we will be having updates all of the time also so it should be fun.

Lurecrest Beauty in May

Just thought we would share a little bit of what we get to see here everyday. The trees all have their leaves back and the lushness of the area continues to amaze us... this is the drive from the Barn out and the Mountain Laurel has bloomed like mad on every road through the grounds. As beautiful as the seasons are around here Spring is hard to beat. This year we had a breathtaking season of Dogwoods and now the Mountain Laurel are astonishing us as well.

This little one is Ella Norton, another one of the beautiful sights that has been a constant here at Lurecrest this year. The daughter of ESBS teachers Bryan and Holly Norton, she always has a smile on her face and is willing to put on a show.

AHHH!!!! NOAH!!!!

So here are a few fun pictures we got this week playing around. Noah and Nate came last night to hang out with everyone for Friday Movie Night with the SBS... "Night at the Museum" is a good flick you should watch if you haven't yet. Noah was on the edge of his seat the whole time.

We had to move a bunch of furniture back and forth between the Walled-Off and the White house because Jeremy and Lindsay will be living in the Walled-Off this summer. We found these old Lurecrest clothes and hats and Nate squeezed into an interesting shirt... thought we'd share.

Paul Beam helped Nate Shuttlesworth (our cook) bolt on his new rear towing hitch that he got for his birthday. Nate's birthday was last wednesday and he turned 29 years old, Happy Birthday Nate!

J-Bo got to reroof the porch covering at the swimming deck. It was a hot day and the roof is a bit steep so we had to have him harnessed in and tied up... you can see his little tether there and he loves his nail guns.

We knew that one picture just wasn't enough so we wanted to leave you with this... very smooth looking eh?

The Men from Steele Creek

The past two days we have been blessed by a group of men who came from the Charlotte area, hailing from Central Steele Creek Presbyterian Church. These guys helped us do some carpentry projects we Lurecrestboys have been wanting to have done. Here are Eric Smith, Ken Price, and Kenny Burns building a landing for a stairway that is borderline unsafe (especially when wet) near Katie's and PJ's. These guys finished this job yesterday and quite a few more tasks today for us.

Today also was the first day of painting the pool which was bummer for Duke Hale who came back to help us do some more work. J-Bo and Duke spent 7 hours painting today and got the entire first coat done, using up some 16 gallons of blue paint. Notice how much the floor faded from last year, yeah, it was the same blue color and just gets bleached out. J-Bo has declared the cleaning and repainting of the pool to be hands down the worst maintenance task here at Lurecrest... he might be right.

These are the other three fine men who came from Steele Creek; Bryan Bridges, Jerry Cheek, and Mike Burrell. They helped us get our new 15 foot net up at the basketball court so that balls will no longer fly off down into the woods. Jerry Cheek wanted to represent NC state so he's flashing the wolfpack sign... he's a character that we love getting to have back up on the mountain.

This the finished product by the stairway... very well done indeed. Their completed list of work: the landing here, a new deck by the pool filters, a new deck by the pool entrance at Dorm 1, fixing a fence by the Ranchhouse that was destroyed by the wind storm, hanging the new net at the basketball court, fixing the diving board at the pool, fixing a stone wall near the Ranchhouse, and fixing a few benches that were falling apart. Not bad for a good days work. We are very grateful for the men who came from Central Steele Creek Pres. Church, ya'll helped us get some much needed things done.

Sarge and a weedwacker!?!

This week at Lurecrest we had a few visitors come and knocked out a bit more work. We did some landscaping, got more of our grounds cleaned up, and prepped the pool to where it's almost ready to paint.

Drew Jones came and visited us again for a few days because he had some business to do in Asheville. We had our camera ready and were waiting another crazy breakfast but he slept in both days and didn't eat anything wierd so sorry about that, maybe next time. We did want to give him some love so we snapped a quick pic of him before he had to go home.

We also had another visitor who we have been meaning to introduce ya'll to. This young man is Duke Hale... who comes to us from the wonderful city of Charlotte. He has actually came the last few weeks periodically so we have had him doing all kinds of fun work. He asked us to treat him like any other 25 year old who comes here to work so we have made him spray Round-up, mow lawns, pick up sticks, hit things with hammers, paint, and pressure wash. J-Bo told him that to wear gloves is to be weak so Duke has been strenuously developing his "man hands". After a bunch of blisters and his third week here with us they are doing well.

This yet another wonderful picture of our beloved ESBS student David Sargent. He's our maintenance servant a few hours every week and you can see here that he conquered the upper field with nothing more than a weed-wacker. These two pictures of him are good enough to be t-shirts material.

Sugaw Church Work Crew

This last weekend we had a wonderful group of folks from Sugaw Presbyterian Church come to help us out doing some work. One of them brought his tractor and helped us fix the poles at the volleyball court... so they are straight again.

Sarah Warden, who has worked on the Outdoor Adventure Team for the last two summers, also came to work with us. She brought her friend Dana and they worked hard all day painting the settling tank and deep well. They were tired of painting Saturday night but were a huge help for us on the maintenance team.

Here are two of the girls from Sugaw who helped us finish painting the craft shop. Now it's little renovation is complete... we hope everyone will enjoy it when they get up here for the summer.

Here is another painting squad from Sugaw. These ladies painted the interior of Cabin 5 for us, covering up all the writing that was all over the beds and walls so it has a little fresher look.

This the rest of the Sugaw crew helped clean up the Leap of Faith area and Victory Circle, we're hoping that the Victory Circle can be revived in the program this summer... at least it's been cleaned up a bit.

The old Victory circle has seen essentially no use over the last 5+ years but it's still in pretty good shape. Us Lurecrestboys would love to see it used again,... so we figured we would invest some time having some folks cleaning it up.

We can't be thankful enough for the crew that came up this last weekend, sorry it took a while to get the post up... we've spent some time resting from a long last few weeks. We'll have some more fun stuff for everyone soon. Thank you again to the folks from Sugaw... can't wait to see you again this summer.

Lurecrestboys B-Ball

We here at Lurecrest have been playing basketball every Tuesday and Thursday night for the last few weeks... it's become one of those expected things. This time we got pictures... and Jeremy White was there... please note the dress socks and hiking boots.

The typical players;

Big Nate, J-Bo, Byron the ESBS teacher, Tom (yes, that Tom), Nathan Shuttlesworth the cook, and the three ESBS students... Jeff, Matt, and David.

Paul and Chuck

These are our Electricians.... hrmmm... working hard as always.

This is Paul Beam, who has been the electrician at camp for as long as anyone can remember. God only knows how many countless hours he has served here at Lurecrest and he still continues to bless us by giving his time and energy to do the electrical work needed here. He likes things done his way but it's because he knows how to do things so well. He has invented all kinds of tools for us and can weld anything we ask him to. We can't be thankful enough for this man, who also has been a blessing to campers as he helps sponsor many children.

This is Paul's partner in crime, Chuck Darnell. An ex-army special forces man, he loves guns and causing trouble... but also has a huge heart for Camp Lurecrest. He really is the brains behind the group and does most of the work (as you can tell). Paul gives Chuck a hard time all the time... and Chuck doesn't ever let us forget it.

Together they drive up here to Lurecrest a few times a week to fix our problems and try to tackle the unending list of needs we have electrically. Essentially there is and always will be more for them to do, but they work so hard and are such a blessing to us with the work they do we wanted to share with you who these wonderful men are. Thanks Paul and Chuck.