I met quite a few different people during the 3 months there. I went away to New York during the time off we had and we stayed in hotels together and seen some sites such as the empire state building. We divided up sometimes though. I spent a whole day with the Australian girl, she was slightly older than me so I didn’t feel like the oldest of the group. We just went round a lot of shops, into an Irish bar and an expensive restaurant but then realized we didn’t want to pay the prices so just got chicken wings between us. Sometimes we didn’t want to go away to New York and stayed closer to home in the Catskills. I became friends with a french girl and a guy from Glasgow. We had heard there was a good place to swim nearby but we ended up walking for miles. It must have been about 3 hours to get to a little lake where we went in for a swim, it was easy to get in and out as there was a ladder but it was freezing and we didn’t last long. We went into a pub afterwards for drinks and to warm up. There was another girl who worked in the office instead of working with campers. I met her early on and we became friends. There were some trips to Walmart that I sometimes got invited to because of her and it was good to get off camp for a while. The last section of it was the kids placement. I got an autistic boy about 10 years old but he looked older. He didn’t speak and it was sometimes really frustrating. He had ways of saying what he wanted but was really challenging as he ran around and got distracted easily and I sometimes couldn’t get him to do things. There were different activities such as art, sensory, small animals and horses that they could go and see. He did some of it and not others. I got him to do some things like the boat trip but he didn’t really want to do it again. All he wanted to do was eat big bowls of cereal. We also had to help them shower and take inventory’s of it in case there were anything unusual. I just did what I was supposed to do and reported to the cabin leader anything unusual. I was glad when it was over as it wasn’t quite what I had imagined. They weren’t quite like normal kids and I had to sometimes just watch him from a distance as I was getting stressed at his behaviour but I was just told to keep a closer eye on him. It was an experience but I wouldn’t do it again.
I did the travelling part of it at the end with the french girl, Glaswegian guy and an English girl. A lot of people just went home but we did a bit of drinking together first in the camp grounds. There was an abandoned truck that we used the inside door to open our beer bottles.On the last day we also took mattresses out one of the cabins and sunbathed as it was a nice day. It was good to relax a while after camp was over. We went to Washington DC, Las Vegas, and LA. The English girl from near Flitwick went home and I went to Vegas with the others. We had quite a good time in Vegas, visiting casinos and the hostel we stayed in was nice and we met some other people. Washington was nice too and we found a nice Chinese restaurant to eat in one night and took some good photos. LA was interesting, there were some things we seen going about that we just kept walking from but we seen the celebrity walkway and got some sun in, although it was a bit too much for me at times and I felt dizzy with it. There was a nice pool in the hostel we quite often went in for a swim. We had a nice time but my friend went home to France after Vegas. I wanted to go to san Francisco so I went by myself. It was a long journey but I stayed in a hostel and took a boat trip past Alcatraz and seen some of the sites of San Francisco but I didn’t really know what to do with myself and felt a bit lost by myself so I just rescheduled my flight a few days early. I decided I had done enough and needed to touch base again for a while, so I made plans and headed home.
Living with Neurodivergence 