Every spring, when I peruse the camp offerings for my children and see the variety of activities, from rock climbing to culinary arts, I recall my own childhood summer days spent lying on the couch watching reruns of The Real McCoys and downing can after can of grape Hi-C. For two weeks, though, I exchanged Walter Brennan and the sugar high for a day camp in the countryside run by my father’s employers. But instead of robot-building and drama workshops, the most exciting things we did at camp were burning hot dogs over campfires, running through the woods for hours (completely unsupervised), and braiding lanyards ad nauseam. (Who needs seventeen lanyards anyway?)
So this year, as I was writing that exorbitant check for junior-rocket-scientist camp, I asked myself, Why can’t grown-ups go to cool camps? (And also, What were those counselors doing together in the locker room while we cemented the pool back together for arts-and-crafts class?)
Well, hello Muddah, hello Faddah! Each year an increasing number of my 78 million fellow baby boomers—almost 2.5 million of them in New Jersey—sign up for adults-only camp. Shipping their children off to marine biology camp in the Bahamas, cathedral restoration projects in Austria, and Outward Bound adventures in the Rockies can make one nostalgic for her own camp days, regardless of any painful memories of having survived atomic wedgies. These days grown-ups slather themselves with insect repellent and head for the great outdoors—never mind that it’s often equipped with luxury linens. And the best thing about being an adult, besides no one yelling at you for eating cake for breakfast, is that grown-ups can attend camp any time of year. Log onto grownupcamps.com and you’ll learn about hundreds of offerings, including plenty in New Jersey.
Nancy Diamond, who co-founded Niche Directories in Boca Raton, Florida, began a Web site for children’s camps in 1995, but it spawned the adult version only a year later. Camps pay $360 a year to be listed on the site. “I saw it as an untapped market,” Diamond says of baby boomer campers.
Although statistics aren’t available for the number of adult camps in the United States and abroad, Diamond’s site has grown tenfold, from 750 initial listings ten years ago to about 7,500 today. She expects that number will even surpass the children’s listings—now at about 23,000—in a few years. “We live in a younger world,” she says. “Eighty is the new 50.”
The American Camp Association, which inspects and accredits camps for all ages, has seen a recent uptick of interest as well, says Ann Sheets, the association president. Camp, says Sheets, “is the all-American experience, whether you’re 6 or 60.” Based in Martinsville, Indiana, the camp association lists 208 camps nationwide for adult singles, 13 percent more than last year, and 259 camps for seniors, an increase of 10 percent. So far, only a few listings on either site are in New Jersey, but an Internet search turns up dozens of other interesting options in the Garden State, such as Air Combat USA’s fighter-pilot camp at Morristown Municipal Airport; three-day workshops at the Cape May Bird Observatory; and Camp Jam in Hammonton, a two-day music fest in the spring and fall with an atmosphere that co-founder Lori Dean, a self-described “old hippie,” likens to a Grateful Dead concert.
As hundreds of thousands of the oldest boomers hit 60 this year, do we need to prove our physical and mental prowess to the younger folk, those unfortunates born after 1964 who’ve had to grow up in our massive shadow? (Solution: Kick their butts at Kopec’s Chess Camp at the Lawrenceville School.) Are we still a bunch of big kids, refusing to concede that we’re, well, old, that we look more like Keith Richards than Jesse McCartney?
Are we so driven that, after we hustle our gifted-and-talenteds off to the Ivy Leagues in their new BMWs, we need to keep living life at a thousand miles an hour? (How about Doug Foley’s drag racing camp in Atco?) Are we so wealthy that we can now buy our own fantasies instead of working to achieve them? (Fifteen grand for four days and three nights gets you center court with Michael Jordan in Las Vegas. Or drop $140,000 for you and nineteen other happy campers to dress up as astronauts and experience zero-gravity flights on a Boeing 727 out of Fort Lauderdale.) Maybe we just want to get away from our kids for a week or two. (Run, don’t walk, to Camp GetAway, formerly known as Camp Mom, in California.)
The answer to those burning questions is: some of the above. For many baby boomers, “These camps are really their own personal merit badges,” says Vickie Abrahamson, the co-founder of a consumer research firm in Minneapolis who recently gave a speech titled “It’s Still All About Me: Universal Values Driving Boomer Luxe” at the fifth annual Boomer Marketing Summit in Miami Beach.
Finished with the “collecting” phase of our lives (children, homes, cars, financial assets) that Generation X has just begun, the “Me Generation” thinks it’s time to experience life like never before. “More than money, now they crave to expand their personal abilities,” Abrahamson says. “They’ve had dreams, and now they have the means to live out their fantasies. They’re able to have a thrill within a certain safety zone.” After all, you’re not alone in the cockpit of that fighter jet over Morris County, and that isn’t live ammunition in the barrel of your M4 assault rifle at the three-day, special-operations, hostage-rescue camp in Seattle. (Unfortunately, the MRE’s for lunch are real.)
In New Jersey, you can connect with your inner bard at an Intensive Journal Workshop in Morristown, perfect your golf swing at Faldo Golf Institute at the lovely old Seaview Marriott in Absecon, or act out your dreams at the New York Film Academy’s AMC Movie Academy, held on the campus of Princeton University (where campers stay in dorms). The fantasy camp for fighter pilots has been such a hit among the over-35 set at its Morristown location that the company wants to expand beyond its twice-a-year schedule. Sheets believes that more adults are pursuing interests they may have abandoned years ago for a regular paycheck. In other words, now is the time to start writing that Great American Novel at the annual Poetry and Prose Getaway on the oceanfront in Cape May in January.
As far as Laura Sperber is concerned, $8,499 on Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy Camp was money well spent. The 47-year-old rare coin dealer from Monmouth Beach had always wanted to play in a rock band, but her drumming days ended with high school. Now, she says, she’s “too old.” But when she heard about the rock camp, held in February in Los Angeles, Sperber jumped at the chance for intensive one-on-one tutorials from the likes of the Who’s Roger Daltrey and Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos. The week culminated in a battle of the bands in which participants played in their own bands at L.A.’s House of Blues. “The momentum builds,” she says, “and when we hit the stage we were every bit as much of a rock star as Bruce Springsteen.” Because of work commitments, Sperber won’t be attending this month’s camp in Manhattan—counselors include blues rocker George Thorogood, former Allman Brothers guitarist Dickey Betts, New Orleans blues legend Dr. John, and E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg—though she will make it for the battle of the bands.
Professional drag racer Doug Foley knows about life in the fast lane, and now he shares it with professionals and amateurs at his drag racing school, based in Atco with five additional U.S. locations. With beginners racing at speeds up to 130 mph, middle-aged doctors, lawyers, and other professionals line up to plop down $450 for the half-day Dragster Experience. “They’re definitely more adventurous than the generation before,” Foley says.
Bill Linton, one of many rookies Foley instructed in 2004, was hooked after his first time in the driver’s seat. Linton, a builder from Millville, has been back to the camp several times and has earned a National Hot Rod Association Competition License. He even gave gift certificates for the program to his daughter and stepson, both in their 40s. Now he puts the pedal to the metal and reaches 167 mph. “All you need is a love for speed,” he says.
In our go-go world, camp is something that can be scheduled, but sometimes it can even be a permission slip to slow down. California’s Camp GetAway claims to provide women with “guilt-free ‘me time’ in a fun-filled, safe environment….Escape responsibility and rediscover your spirit—it’s healthy!” A healthy, fit image is also important to grown-up campers. Instead of parking themselves on the beach and sucking down margaritas, they’re ponying up for fitness camps like the Nike Tennis Camp in Lawrenceville and Bob Bertucci Volleyball Camps, based in Gibbsboro.
That’s not exactly my idea of R and R. When my twins were toddlers, I fantasized about a week’s stay at what my grandmother would have called a “rest home.” My septuagenarian mother and her friend—who have toured Siberia, stood on the Great Wall of China, and cruised around Cape Horn—look at me aghast when I wax poetic about three meals a day with chocolate pudding served on a tray in an adjustable bed, all the Lifetime TV movies I can handle on a television bolted to the wall, and shuttle bus service to six malls.
Apparently this is not where my peers will be headed, even in their golden years. After they finish their flights of fancy and go deaf from too many band battles or arthritic from too many slam dunks, they’ll know where to find me. I’ll be the one in the lounge chair with the bowl of chocolate pudding.
Nancy Erickson is a contributing writer for New Jersey Monthly.