I probably won’t be posting much on this blog for the next month or so. This week, I’m leaving for Las Vegas to visit my grandparents, Gerald and Patty Badgers. They live in Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas.

After that, it’s off to Vermont for summer camp at Circus Smirkus. I’m going to Session IV, the advanced performance camp again. I went last year, and it was amazing! Can’t wait to go back.

Circus Smirkus is at a winter ski school called Burke Mountain Academy, in northeastern Vermont — nearly 3 hours north of the airport in Burlington, Vermont. So to get there I have to fly to Washington DC, change planes, fly to Vermont, and get picked up by a driver who will take me from the airport to camp. On the way back, I change planes in Chicago. It takes all day to make the trip, and there’s a long layover in the city where you change planes.  That’s the only bad part about going to Circus Smirkus for camp, though.  The rest of it is wonderful!

We rehearse and perform in huge circus tents, and sleep in the dormitories the boarding school students use in the winter. The focus is on acrobatics (pyramids, tumbling, parkour, trampoline, etc.), aerial skills (trapeze, lyra, silks, rope, Spanish web, etc.), juggling (they juggle most anything at Circus Smirkus!), clowning (mime, slapstick and comedia del arte, plus “style & smile” and general performance skills), and balance skills (tight rope, slack rope, rola-bola, stilts, unicycle), but there are lots of “regular” summer camp activities like talent shows, swimming, arts and crafts and so on. There’s even a pie day, where we throw pies at each other — and we wear costumes to dinner at night. Some people pack more costume pieces and props than regular clothes.  It’s lots of fun.

The food is really good, too. But what’s really the best is the people — the counselors and staff are great, and you meet kids from all over the country who are really interested in circus. I am hoping to room with one of my friends from last year. He lives in Chicago, and I haven’t seen him since last summer. Can’t wait to catch up with him and all my other friends from Circus Smirkus!

I’ll post pictures if I can, but I probably won’t write much until it’s almost time for school to start again. You can see some photos from last year at Circus Smirkus by clicking here, here or here.