Welcome to Weird Wednesdays, hosted by It’s OK to be WEIRD!

I recently had the goofiest experience with a shower at camp.

We had the opportunity to head off to a ministry family retreat not too long ago, at a nice Christian camp up north.  It’s a great place, nice facility, but it’s a CAMP… so everyone uses the common washrooms at the end of the hall, and all that jazz.

The first night we were at camp I decided I needed to take a shower and shave my legs because we’d be swimming while we were there, and I had gotten busy (i.e., not taken the time) before we left to take care of that detail.  So I trooped down to the community washroom with all my gear to tackle the camp shower.

I chose one of the 3 showers that I hoped would be most cooperative (i.e., one that wouldn’t spray out in random directions and still give a generous amount of water pressure).  I picked the shower stall in the middle because it had an actual shower head on it. I thought the shower head looked more promising than the bare shower fixture in the 3rd stall. That, and it wasn’t the FIRST one – I was thinking that if I picked the first one, and then someone else came in to shower, they would definitely have to go past all of my stuff, in a small walkway area outside the shower stalls, possibly knocking my things off the hooks and bench, etc.  Yup, the middle shower was my choice.

The only way to check a shower head is to actually use it, and in the small space there was no way to turn the water on without getting wet.  So it wasn’t until I had all my toiletries in the stall with me and had left my clothes on the hooks outside that I found out that I had picked poorly.  The shower head was adjusted to point down as far as possible, and yet still managed to spray the stall door behind me and every wall in the stall.

Did I mention that my towel and pajamas were hanging on the stall door?

There’s no turning back at this point.  I was already FULLY committed to this shower stall, unless of course I wanted to move me and all my stuff into another stall… that would involve the risk of streaking and possibly flashing another unsuspecting pastors’ wife or pastors’ kids if they happened to come into the shower area while I was rearranging things.  Yah, no…. this was my stall, and I was stuck.

So the water is spraying everywhere, while I’m realizing I have to stay the course and get my shower done. And of course the water starts out FREEZING cold, so I turned up the hot, trying to be careful, expecting a full on burn at any second.  It was going well, until somebody flushed the toilet and then I WAS scalded with super hot water.  No where to go to get out of the streams of water, much.  I just had to take what was coming.  So, after some fancy dancing and some fast hand work on the faucet, I finally got the shower temperature relatively comfortable so I could quickly do the regular shower things and get ready to shave.

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Of course, with water shooting everywhere in the stall, and no place to sit or really lean, the task of shaving was comical at best.  I was trying to do a little hover thing with my leg so I could get the shave cream to stay on my leg, and out of the water streams.  Trying…. and not succeeding.  FINALLY I decided to chance turning off the shower, and freezing in the drafty common washroom, while I shaved.  The biggest risk with this wasn’t the “freezing while the water was off” part, but the “freezing even more and possibly burning off body parts after that when turning the water back ON” part.

While chattering and trying to hurry with shaving (never a great idea) I managed to drop the can of shaving cream.  When I tried to grab it, I hit the top dispenser button as the bottom of the can hit the floor, so I dispensed copious amounts of shave cream all over the shower stall, out under the door of the shower stall, right into my slippers, as the shave cream shot out at an alarming rate and not in a straight line, interestingly.  All that happened in like a second, you realize, but it almost completely filled my slippers with shave cream!

So, leaving my slippers for later, I managed to get a few serious swipes completed with the razor, but there was no careful or close shaving going on that night.  I then had to once again dance the “too hot, too cold” jig when I turned the water back on to rinse off.  And my fears were confirmed – that was worse than the freezing without the water on.  Finished up with that, and turned the water off again.  Freezing, some more…

I was trying to clean the shaving cream up from everywhere and gather my shampoo and stuff when I dropped my towel in the middle of it all.  I towelled off as well as I could with a wet towel, avoiding the shaving cream spots on it, and retrieved my damp pajamas from the stall door (how they escaped the shaving cream barrage I have NO idea).  I got all my stuff together, wiped out my slippers as best I could and headed back to the room.

Thankfully I was in a great mood that night or I would have been really frustrated with all the goofiness.  I just had to laugh, it was all so crazy.  I was very thankful that nobody came in during that whole time so I wasn’t embarrassing myself even more.

I had to let my slippers dry by the wall heater over night.  I’m not sure they will ever be the same after serving as shaving cream receptacles.  

The shower was crazy enough… but it gets better.  The next day we were getting ready to go swimming, the whole family, and I discovered that I had not even packed my swim suit!!  I went through the whole shower fiasco for NO reason.  I could have jumped in (with only 1 “too hot, too cold” jig), done the shower thing, jumped out, and been finished!!!!

At that realization, once again, all I could do was laugh!  It was another great weird experience!  Camp showers are crazy enough without this kind of extra drama!!

*** Join me in the weirdness, too… I KNOW you’ve encountered SOMETHING weird somewhere this week!! Leave me a comment and tell me all about it!!  And have a look around for more Weird Wednesdays here on my blog!***