Whether we want to admit it or not summer is over and the time of camping is gone. Boy Scouts camp out in the wintertime but the rest of us prefer sleeping out in the warm weather.

When my daughters were young we went to a Baptist Church in Brighton where the kids were rewarded for perfect attendance by getting half of their way paid to camp. My girls never missed Sunday school. They loved going to the Baptist Camp down by Monument and sleeping in tents. I was always careful to have enough money to pay our half of their way to camp because I knew how important camp was to a young person.

The haunting whistle of a train in the night takes me back many years to my first train ride and my first camp.

It seemed as if I had been waiting all my life to go to camp and here I was in the fifth grade and finally my dream came true. I was getting to go to camp. I was raised a Seventh Day Adventist and we went to Sabbath School. I had listened to my teachers talk about going to camp, where the smell of the pine trees filled the mountain air, but I never got to go because we didn't have the money. I knew a little bit about camping out because we had stayed in tents when we went to Yosemite National Park but I had never been to church camp. I had played "camp" at home many times but it was hard for me to know what church camp was really like because I had never been there. How I dreamed of going to camp.

After we moved to Washington my dream came true. One very early morning while it was still dark my parents, sister and I got up in the middle of the night (or so it seemed to me) to catch a train. We had joined a small church and we were going to a tent meeting. We climbed aboard the train that early morning to go to a campsite south of Seattle. The sun was just coming up and I was still sleepy but I didn't want to miss a thing. I sat looking out of the window as the countryside sped past us. We went through the Cascade Mountains and saw snow along the tracks. Snow was still a wonder to me because we hadn't been away from California very long.

But that was only the beginning because when the train stopped and we climbed down I found myself in the mountains. I could smell the pines now. The camp was all I ever dreamed of. It sat by a lake and huge circus type tents stood in the midst of pine covered mountains. We slept in small tents and went to a large tent and stood in a line to get our food, sat at picnic tables to eat, under the evergreen trees or in the big shelter.

The church services were held in the biggest tent. I always loved music and this music was heavenly. A new song that year was "The Haven of Rest." It is another part of my favorite memories.

The last day of camp we stood by the lake as people were baptized. One girl who was baptized was my age, but she looked much older. She had on real silk stockings. I had never worn hose, I was still wearing bobby socks. She wore those fancy stockings into the lake while she was being baptized. I always wanted to be baptized in a lake after that. I think it made me think of the river where Jesus was baptized.

I made sure that my children and the grandson who lived with me always had the chance to go to camp. I wanted them to have happy camping memories too, just as I did after that. Sometimes when I hear the whistle of a train I relive that early morning train ride to the mountains and that happy camp meeting time in Washington.