Why We Tour
Right now, we’re in the middle of one of our favorite stretches of the year. Between the Poconos, the Adirondacks, New Hampshire, and Vermont, we’ve now walked more camp campuses this summer than we can count on two hands and feet combined — and there’s still more ahead before the season wraps.
And every single family we work with asks some version of the same question: why does it matter that you’re the ones walking the campus, and not just reading the brochure like I can?
Fair question. Here’s our honest answer.
Because touring while camp is in session is when camps show you the truth.
Any camp can put together a beautiful website. Any camp can hand you a glossy brochure with kids laughing on a dock at golden hour. That’s marketing, and it’s not wrong to have it — but it’s not the whole picture.
When we tour during session, we’re not seeing a staged version of camp. We’re seeing camp actually happening. Kids mid-activity, not posed for it. Counselors mid-shift, not on their best behavior for a photographer. The real rhythm of a real day. That’s the version that tells us whether a camp is actually going to be the right fit for a kid — not just whether it looks good in a photo.
Because the details you can’t get from a website are usually the ones that matter most.
Is the waterfront actually that close to the bunks, or is that camera angle doing some heavy lifting? Do the counselors seem like they genuinely like being there, or are they counting down the days? What does the dining hall sound like at lunch — chaotic, warm, structured? How do staff talk to a homesick 9-year-old versus how they talk to a confident 15-year-old?
You can’t get any of that from a PDF. We can only get it by standing there.
Because sometimes the best stories aren’t the ones camps are trying to tell you.
Ask any camper what their favorite part of camp is and you’ll usually hear the same answers — the friendships, Color War, the people. All true, all real. But this week we heard a story we never would’ve gotten from a brochure.
A bunk of boys had built their own video games — out of paper. Characters, challenges, levels, the whole thing, all designed by hand. And they’d turned it into a real system, voting as a group on who earned their way to the next level. No screens, no consoles, just a bunk full of kids using their imaginations and figuring out how to work as a team to build something together. Nobody assigned that. They just did it, because that’s what camp gives kids room to do.
Same trip, we watched a group of 14-year-old girls learning to roll out dough for the first time — girls who’d never been to camp before, from opposite sides of the country, who’d known each other for maybe a few days. They were an absolute mess in the kitchen and having the time of their lives.
That’s the stuff we’re actually looking for when we tour. Not whether the bunks are nice or the dining hall is impressive — though we notice that too — but whether kids are building things, connecting with people totally different from them, and finding their thing. You can’t manufacture that for a tour. You either see it happening, or you don’t.
Because we’re not touring for us. We’re touring for your kid.
Every family who works with us has a different kid, with a different personality, different needs, different things that would make them thrive or make them miserable. We can’t match a kid to a camp well if our only reference point is what a camp says about itself. We need firsthand impressions — recent ones, not memories from five years ago — so that when we sit down with you, we’re not guessing. We’re telling you what we saw with our own eyes, this summer.
So if you see us posting from the road, or hear that we just got back from another round of tours — that’s not just us racking up frequent flyer miles. That’s the legwork behind every recommendation we make to you.
We’ll be back in the office soon enough. Until then, we’ll be walking campuses, taking notes, and getting ready to tell you exactly what we found.
Livin’ 10 for 2,
Ricki
