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Not Your Parents' Summer Camp

By drorzel on July 3, 2007.

The New York Times today has a story about a different sort of summer camp:

Students with a passion for all things explosive and proof of United States citizenship pay a $450 fee that covers food, lodging and incidentals like dynamite. In the course of a week, the 22 students at this session set off a wall of fire, blasted water out of a pond, blew up a tree stump and obliterated a watermelon. They set off explosive charges in the school's mine and finished off the week by creating their own fireworks show for their parents.

The Summer Explosives Camp actually feeds into a program at the University of Missouri in Rolla, that's designed to train people to do blasting for mining and demolition, and they do discuss safety issues at length. But still, a summer camp where you're encouraged to blow things up sounds pretty cool...

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Going from Arkansas (grad school) to Ohio-Pa (my wife's parents and mine), Rolla was a good lunch stop (of course we drove, we were in grad school....), and the Wendy's there is right across the street from the Explosives Engineering School or whatever its called. We often wondered how many kilotons of stuff were in the building :-)

Hell, for $450, I'd go.