The time-honored summer camp rituals of sunburned noses and bunk loyalties, arts and crafts and promises to write after the summer is over are alive and well, but not all campers are being picked up at the end of the session by Mom and Dad, ready for a new school year. For a growing crop of campers, it’s back to the desk job, the mortgage, the marriage.
Welcome to the age of adult sleepaway camp, where people with student loans and mortgages pay upwards of $1,000 for a multi-day reprieve, trading in punching clocks, exchanging business cards and surfing the web for everything from sunrise yoga and self-care workshops to making dream-catchers and vision boards alongside like-minded strangers.
In short, full-grown adults are spending small heaps of money to act like little kids.
At Soul Camp East and West locations, which attract 65 percent women from their mid-20s to mid-60s, bug juice is replaced with Kombucha, Sloppy Joes have been swapped out for veggie burgers and the bonfires now incorporate fear-burning ceremonies to go along with your s’mores. Talent show acts can range from show tunes to adults reciting spoken word about their recent divorce or going through menopause. Color War is less cutthroat than the childhood throwdowns you might remember, more of a participation trophy vibe.
Everyone is made to feel like a winner at camp. There are no cliques, no mean girls, no misfits and no popularity contests. For many, it’s a place to show your true colors and heal, as it was for Lindsay Walz.
The Minnesotan was 32 years old last summer when she first set foot in New York’s Soul Camp, a multi-day, all-inclusive wellness camp for adults.
As a child she’d gone to Bible camp, but that was long before the near-death experience that led her to believe she needed to spend a week at the camp.
It was rush hour on a Wednesday evening in August 2007 when Walz was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge headed home when she heard what sounded like a crack. Moments later, due to a design flaw, the entire bridge collapsed, sending Walz and her Volkswagen Passat plummeting 120 feet into the water.
By the end of the day, 13 lives had been lost and 145 people injured.
Walz’s back was broken, but she was rescued. She considers August 1, that day she skirted death and was given a new lease on life, a sort of second birthday. Eight years after, she said goodbye to her husband and headed to camp to learn to, as she puts it, “Live as a thriver rather than a survivor.”
To sum up her experience at Soul Camp, which this year costs $999 for four days, Walz says, “Before I went, I felt like a kid again wondering if people would like me. The maturity, age and wisdom that go along with the adult sleepaway camp experience does a better job calming those nerves. I felt like I belonged right away.” For the price of admission, which was waived for Walz after she won a contest, she got a new perspective on herself: “Camp made me grow and value myself as me.”
It’s not just the campers who benefit from the trend, camp property owners prosper as well. The majority of these adventures take place at traditional children’s sleepaway camps, so after those rosy-cheeked boys and girls pack up their trunks and board their buses, those same bunks are overrun by adult campers ranging from millennials to baby boomers.
“It’s a great new source of revenue for camp owners who in the summer camp world call it shoulder programming,” says Dave Kushner of Camp No Counselors, featured on “Shark Tank” in 2015. By tacking on the adult sleepaway camp profits, camp property owners get more bang for their bunk.
With a variety of adult sleepaway camps on the rise across the United States and Canada, it’s become big business for the visionaries who are creating these experiences, like Adam Tichauer, founder of Camp No Counselors. Tichauer organized the first Camp No Counselors weekend in 2013 as a one-off idea to get his friends together.
According to Kushner, his business partner and director of community engagement, “After the weekend ended, everyone couldn’t wait to get back together” and a second weekend was soon planned. Tichauer knew he had created something special, and a few months later left his job as president and chief executive officer of Playbutton, a music technology business, so that he could focus on Camp No Counselors. Now, the company presents more than a dozen camps each year.
Geared toward those who prefer mimosas and bloody marys to green juice, Camp No Counselors allows you “to play like a kid and party like a grownup” with the help of an open bar throughout the stay. If Soul Camp’s vibe is a wellness retreat, Camp No Counselors is more like Club Med.
When 28-year-old Tyger Danger’s boyfriend broke up with her over the phone two years ago, she had no reason to continue living in Florida, so she began applying for jobs and moved to New York City for a fresh start within a matter of weeks.
After hearing about Camp No Counselors, the newly single Danger boarded a bus to one of their New York camps and “had the time of my life.” She even got on stage at the talent show to read a poem she wrote about her recent heartbreak, thanks to a bit of liquid courage from “a few glasses of champagne.”
The following summer, Danger returned to Camp No Counselors. This time, she wasn’t alone: She brought her new boyfriend.
“I was nervous and kind of freaking out wondering if he’d like camp and if my friends would like him,” she says. “In the end I had nothing to worry about. He loved it and they loved him.”
Now, it seems, being a happy camper isn’t reserved solely for kids.