Our Place Summer Adventure Camp

05/22/2023

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a very tedious person. Even writing her name drains one's energy; she's like a fascist black hole.So what is the best way to respond to someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene? Should we ignore her, and those of her ilk, and hope that she will magically disappear? Are thos...

05/22/2023

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who earned two Ivy League degrees, has apparently decided that making Florida schools and universities the laughingstock of the country is good politics. The Republican already went after public school teachers with his “don’t say gay” bill, championed an effort to p...

05/22/2023

Robert C. GrantWarren Burger, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Supreme Court, 1969-1986, said and wrote:“The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the …

05/20/2023

Truth, oh truth. Where are you

The New York Post dropped a bombshell report last week: amid a nationwide influx of migrants, nearly two-dozen homeless veterans were kicked out of hotels where they were being temporarily housed in order to make room for migrants in upstate New York.The story, which was based on a claim by a vetera...

05/15/2023

James Comer claims he has a whistleblower who will make ‘Watergate look like jaywalking’, but is yet to deliver“This is a very serious investigation,” James Comer, chairman of the US House of Representatives’ oversight committee, told the rightwing channel Newsmax recently. “The allegati...

05/14/2023

The sociologist Matthew Desmond believes that being poor is different in the U.S. than in other rich countries.Why do so many Americans live in poverty? Because so many rich people benefit from it.This is the thesis of the lauded sociologist Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America. The bes...

05/14/2023

Watch out ..
Your voting rights are next

With respect to 2024 and beyond, the possibility that a future Republican president might create a national voting police force is terrifying.In an increasingly unsafe and, frankly, unhinged America, …

05/13/2023

Think about it

Here's what it means to be a Republican voter in the year 2023.If you vote for a Republican, you’re selecting someone who—once elected—is unlikely to support your views on the issues that matter to …

02/09/2023

Civility disappeared at State of the UnionWhat has happened to our country, that we no longer respect the office of the president of the United States? Have we stooped so low that we have to heckle …

01/17/2022

It is a sad, sad day for me. I have to tell everyone that OPsac is no more. We will no longer share our summer adventures with some of the greatest kids in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

21 years ago, we decided that our communities deserved the best programs for our kids. We began with our adventure camp sharing adventures that no other camp would even think about. We went paintballing, river rafting, to major amusement parks, to the zoo, the aquarium, Port Discovery and more. Each day was a new adventure.
Camp grew from 36 kids the first year, to more than a hundred campers a day, and continued that way until the recession of 2007, when our daily count of kids dropped to about 50. But the next summer, we began to see growth. We bought new buses, planned more trips, and had more fun.
Then came the dreaded virus, Covid 19, and our lives were changed forever. We continued camp for the summer of 2020. We all wore masks, we sanitized the buses daily, we had everyone use hand sanitizer every time they got on the bus. And we were blessed with no covid related issues for the kids or our staff.
By January of 2021, I became much more concerned about the health and wellbeing of our campers and staff. I spoke with several doctors and their advice was to not have camp. At that point, vaccines were not available for kids. The number if infections was growing daily. I was not comfortable with the problems we could face, because with more people suffering illness and the absolute impossibility of keeping kids socially distanced, (try that in a pool or playing soccer), I was afraid of spreading the virus from the kids to parents and grand parents not to mention staff. So, we decided to take a year off.
In the fall of 2021, my wife and I talked about camp and the toll it had taken on me physically (I’m not a youngster anymore). Because the buses sat for a year, they needed major work. Most of the places we wanted to go were still closed or running with limited programs. Even our favorite swimming pools were limiting entry. I prayed long and hard. I did not want to disappoint the kids. They deserve a summer camp program that exceeded everyone’s expectations.
By early December 2021, it became very obvious that the of work we would have to do, and the time it would take was next to impossible to accomplish.
So, by Christmas, we made the hard decision to end our program. Honestly, that decision hurt.
I want to express my thanks to the more than 4,000 unique kids we had in camp, more than 2000 families, and the more than 200 people that made up our staff. It was an honor and privilege to share years with you, and I can only hope and pray that we had a positive influence on all of you. We accomplished our goals of providing an adventure camp to challenge the kids to do things they had never done, to go places they had never been, and to learn to care about the other kids in camp.
At 75 years old, it is time to step back and enjoy my days as a grandfather.
Thank you for the privilege and opportunity to share your lives and I hope that we all learned to care about one another.

07/13/2021

THIS IS ONE OF THE TIMES I HATE TO BE RIGHT....

WASHINGTON — The U.S. has seen a string of COVID-19 outbreaks tied to summer camps in recent weeks in places such as Texas, Illinois, Florida, Missouri and Kansas, in what some fear could be a preview of the upcoming school year.

In some cases the outbreaks have spread from the camp to the broader community.

The clusters have come as the number of newly confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. has reversed course, surging more than 60% over the past two weeks from an average of about 12,000 a day to around 19,500, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The rise in many places has been blamed on too many unvaccinated people and the highly contagious delta variant.