“In the heart of a wooded mountain, circled by silvery streams, is a dear old place called Rockbrook, the scene of our girlhood dreams…”

For the sixth summer in a row, I attended Rockbrook Camp for Girls, a small, rural camp in Brevard, North Carolina. For nearly a month, I, along with two hundred other girls, sang loudly in the dining hall, traded colorful friendship bracelets and enjoyed blissfully cool mornings and evenings in an open-air cabin.

One of my favorite parts of my experience this year was planning Banquet, an enormous theme dinner that occurs at the end of the session. Past themes have included “Fifties Diner,” “Under the Sea” and “The Great American Road Trip.” On the second day of camp, all twenty-eight rising sophomores hiked for hours in order to decide on our unique subject.

Ultimately, we reached an agreement: with its multiple “exhibits,” “Another Night at the Museum” would allow us to include all of our ideas, whether they concern art, history or science. For the remaining days, we all crammed into a small, spray-paint-scented cabin to paint, design costumes and write skits.

As part of planning Banquet, we were required to create 185 posters in order to cover the walls of the dining hall. I vividly remember our first: an enormous replica of van Gogh’s Starry Night. By the end of it, our knees and shirts were dotted with shades of blue and our hands were covered in yellow glitter, but ruined clothing was worth the pride we felt at the completion of that first poster.

After Starry Night, our posters ranged from a simple “bathroom door” to a coral reef complete with clownfish and glitter. Some were considered great masterpieces, such as a painting of the solar system or a depiction of the famed Venus statue, while others were mediocre at best, like our attempt at the Mona Lisa. There was never enough gold spray paint and always too much black, and every day, one of us inevitably got glitter in our hair.

Throughout the month, I worked with girls I never would have spoken to otherwise and made countless new friends. While some aspects of Banquet planning, including fierce fights, cabinmates in tears and 99.9 Kiss Country radio, were undoubtedly rough, the entire experience ultimately brought our group together. As one of our camp songs so aptly states, “Camp is a special place for which we yearn… we live for the moment when we can return.”