Author’s Note: Over the summer, I returned for my fifth year at Camp Seneca Lake in Penn Yan, New York, a summer camp for Jewish youth. While at camp, I wrote this article about a bike trip my cohort—me and thirty other campers—took part in. I interviewed peers and staff members to see how the bike trip, and camp as a whole, affected them. Please enjoy.
Dozens of Camp Seneca Lake senior campers completed in late July an annual tradition: a three-day, hundred-mile bicycle trip. The trip followed weeks of preparation and training, but staff of the Jewish summer camp say the goal was beyond athletic ability.
“I saw them push themselves beyond what they thought they could do, and I saw them push each other,” said Emily Weiss, a counselor in charge of the bike trip. Post-trip, “there’s more of a sense of community with people asking each other how they’re doing, if they’re okay,” Weiss said.
During the trip, which took the group to Keuka Lake and Hammondsport before circling back to Seneca Lake, campers said they became closer with their peers. Senior camper Rebecca Brozost said that the group was able to “bond over hardships.”
“It helps us get closer while biking by conversing over shared difficulties with people you normally don’t talk with,” Brozost said.
The bike trip was especially memorable for some campers because of the parts that challenged them.
“Personally I thought it was a great growing moment because I had never been in a situation this hard, but doing it in a group with everyone else doing the same thing, the smallest things mean so much, like finding a Burger King and going so crazy,” said senior camper Lily Liberman.
“We were brought closer together because we all had to overcome something huge so we could all relate to it,” she said.
The annual bike trip is just one part of the senior camper “Tuscarora” program for rising tenth graders at the Jewish summer camp. After the bike trip, the group goes on to hold a banquet, lead their respective teams in the camp’s Color War, and participate in a triathlon.
The bike trip is the first time the group truly comes together as one.
Camper Miles Cohen said before the bike trip, “We were all being mean to each other—boys and girls—and the bike trip was the first step of us getting closer together in general.”
“I feel like we got new connections, we were able to bond,” Cohen said.
Not all parts of the bike trip went according to plan. On the last day, it started to storm.
“[My most memorable] moments would be obviously the end, arriving to Camp Road, but also biking in the rain uphill. There was a stretch where I was just biking in the rain for like a mile and a half,” camper Isaac Greene ’29 said.
Liberman said that “all of the amazing staff [were] telling us to keep going.”
Weiss, who was biking with a handful of girls at the back of the group, said that during the storm, the campers realized they were capable of continuing on. “They stopped asking to stop and they just kept going,” she said.
In the midst of it all, campers made connections they won’t forget soon.
“On the last day, there was a long road with a long downhill; I was thinking about what I want to get out of the rest of the summer. [Another camper] joined and we talked,” Cohen said. “We were reflecting on our memories and trying to change for the rest of Tusc,” he said.
At the end of the road, the village came together with new connections and a sense of achievement. They stopped to reconvene just as they reached the top of Camp Road.
“We had the biggest smiles on our faces,” Liberman said.
Campers feel their senior summer is sacred. “For me Tusc has been one of the happiest times I’ve ever had, I’ve met so many people and I want to cherish every moment,” Cohen said.
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