Intergenerational elderhosteling in Northwest Georgia, anyone?Jul 11 '09 Write an essay on this topic. The Bottom Line Select your program carefully and have a fine time at Cohutta Springs. But study program details carefully. You might, for instance, like horses but not the overnight tenting with kids. What a useful catch-all epinions' writer's corner is! Had I found a listing for Cohutta Springs Adventist Conference Center in Crandall, Georgia, I would have placed this essay in that pigeonhole and earned perhaps a nickel or more from epinions. Under writer's corner, however, I can describe my just completed five-day intergenerational elderhostel under non-fiction headings as varied as animal, biography, family, geography, health, nature, recreation, religion, science and travel. And if education were a permitted topic, I could have chosen that as the nest wherein to embed my essay below. I suspect that the form of informal adult education known as elderhostels is familiar to readers of epinions. If not see http://www.elderhostel.org/ . I have taught courses four times for the standard "distance" elderhostels (people from all over the world drive or fly to them and stay for three to five days on site) and participated as a student in another 36. For the other, localized, stay-at-home varieties stretching out for four to eight weeks known as Elderhostel Institutes I have taught a score of times. But new to both my wife Mary and me was, before July 5 - 10, 2009, the INTERGENERATIONAL form of "distance" elderhostel. This pairs off one or two grandparents and one or two of their grandchildren for several days together, sharing a room (sometimes a tent) and doing things together such as currying and riding horses, white-water rafting, weaving baskets and such like. In our case we dipped our toes into INTERGENERATIONING with the oldest of our six grandsons (our two granddaughters are still too young to go with us). Fourteen-year old Gavin Patrick, his parents and five brothers were our guests July 4th for pig roast at our Highland Farms Retirement Community (http://www.highlandfarms.com) here in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Parents and siblings then drove home that evening 75 miles south to Greenville, SC and Gavin overnighted with us. Next day, Sunday (distance elderhostels typically run from Sunday evening till lunch the following Friday) we three drove 240 miles for 4 1/2 scenic hours via Knoxville and Chattanooga to Cohutta Springs Conference center near the village of Crandall in NW Georgia. See http://www.cohuttasprings.com/ . This 750-acre site is one of 30 conference centers run by Seventh-Day Adventists in the United States. I was told that most, if not all of them, are also associated with youth camps on the same grounds. There were only 24 of us in our intergenerational group styled WET AND WILD. We shared all our meals and took turns at buses, blobs, water slides, swimming pool and such like with another larger elderhostel group with younger grandchildren. Our 24 included three grandfathers, one great-aunt (traveling with her sister), three teen-age girls and the rest either grandmothers or grandsons. Each family unit shared a bedroom having two queen-sized beds in a three-storey walk-up lodge with tub, two sinks and in some cases a balcony. All units faced a lake with hills behind. Room facilities included everything customary in a good upper-middle range motel, including by far the best, strongest-signaled most problem-free Wi-Fi network I have ever experienced anywhere. Cell phones also worked without problem, despite our nearby mountains and distance from I-75 running between Chattanooga and Atlanta. Facilities date in some cases from the 1970s but almost all have been recently renovated and look both Alpine and modern. Some staff live in small houses on the grounds. The substantive content for us in WET AND WILD and also for the other elderhostel group was, in my judgment, 90% pitched toward the children and 10% for adults. Since this was the first intergenerational elderhostel for Mary and me, we experienced notable culture shock. There was a certain commonality of outlook and experience among the grandparents. Several were determined to go elderhosteling at least once with every single grandchild -- in one case to the number of sixteen. Most grandparents had attended far more intergenerational than adults-only elderhostels. It was striking to hear a 15 year old boy telling of his four previous elderhostels beginning at age seven. I quickly developed a sense that these were serious, serious grandparents. Mary and I exchanged views with all WET AND WILD grandparents and with a half dozen of those in that second group with the pre-teens. The younger children did horses, an overnight campout, climbed ropes and such like. If there is an art form called doting, then these grandparents had mastered it. There seemed to be nothing they would not do for their youngsters, beginning with the $470/child they paid to have them along with them (for themselves the adults paid between $518 and $768 apiece, depending on how many adults and children shared a room, meals, rides, museums, etc.) Most of the adults seemed notably well off, but not all. Some of the eleven children left something to be desired in manners. Most gravitated immediately to the other youngsters, bonding quickly and well and forming friends groupings for their facebooks. Two sets of grandparents had turned over their own homes as rent-free permanent residences forever to children and grandchildren while living in RVs themselves. Things we WETS & WILDS all did together began with a visit to Chattanooga's fabled Aquarium on the first full day (Monday) concluding with a paddle-wheeler supper cruise on the Tennessee River, then a field demonstration next morning of local wildlife in a meadow and afterwards wading and looking for critters along a rocky stream. Our grandson enjoyed letting a small rat snake coil around his neck. Later that day we drove to the Conasauga River, donned goggles and looked at crawfish, turtles and 90 fish species including some wee beastie that flashed its luminescent pectoral fins against my mask. I also survived bouncing off a sharpish rock. The weather was uniformly cloudy, cooler than the week before, affording good protection against sunburning. In short: perfect. On Wednesday morning, on the Center's separate grounds for camping kids we WET AND WILD elderhostelers young and old were all taught the ABCs of paddling canoes. That afternoon we tested our new skills during a three mile canoe run on a shallow, unchallenging stretch of the variously spelled Hiawassee River. All this was part of an intelligently graded (in degrees of getting wet, that is) preparation for steadily wilder adventures. These culminated in an early morning run in Tennessee on the Ocoee River, just below where the 1996 river olympics were held. Gran, Granddad and Gavin shared a rubber raft with a boy from California and a grannie from Ohio plus a "guard" supplied by Cohutta Springs and Tony, an 18-year river veteran TVA-certified guide supplied by our outfitter, Outland Expeditions (http://www.outlandexpeditions.com/ ). For us three (but not for most of the adults) this was our first white-water rafting experience. No one fell out of our rubber boat during five miles of level 3 and 4 rapids. But two grannies went overboard from another raft (they were quickly rescued) and one youngish show-off guide went over in another. One girl fell in from a third raft. I doubt that I will ever pay to do whitewater rafting again, but it was fun while it lasted and might conceivably have survival benefits somewhere, sometime in the future. The evening before we left, both intergenerational groups enjoyed together a 90 minute popular science display in a large auditorium by a teacher, including experiments with bottled hydrogen and nitrogen, pumps, vacuums, shooting a ping pong ball through a coke can and similar feats much appreciated by all, especially the younger children. On my first U.S. Foreign Service overseas assignment (to Hong Kong 1964 - 66) I had worked for some months with seven American voluntary agencies distributing surplus wheat under PL-480 Title Three. One such was Seventh-Day Adventist and they were very good at what they did. I learned that they deliberately de-emphasized in Hong Kong traditional abstaining from meat by their poor Chinese converts. The latter ate little meat to begin with, but on rare grand occasions such as weddings, they insisted upon their pork. Later, on my assignment to Karachi, Pakistan, our older son had his first bout of asthma and was cared for in a good Adventist hospital. Since then I have read of Adventist accomplishments in tropical medicine and at their medical college at Loma Linda University in California. Otherwise, our few days at Cohutta Springs was my most intensive exposure to this fast growing religion. The new faith formally began, as I recall, in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1863 (modified from the Millerites after their disappointment that the world did not end on the date predicted in the 1840s) and is now up to perhaps 17 million baptized by immersion, world-wide adherents in 2009. Seventh-day Adventists are growing, especially in South America and Africa, at the rate of a million a year. I formed very favorable impressions of the staff at Cohutta Springs Conference Center (all of them Adventists except for locally hired kitchen staff and room cleaners). Imagine a young, caring Mother Teresas in shorts or an activities minister wearing a handle bar mustache. Some of the friendliest, most professional, hard-working Americans I have ever met anywhere. Except for the General Manager: he was friendly enough but came from Normandy, France. Adventists can and do make good national and worldwide careers within a huge network of schools, youth camps, hospitals, retirement communities, publications and on and on. A large majority of their clients (30,000 last year at Cohutta Springs) are non-Adventists. Apart from elderhostels, Adventists are charged less money than non-Adventists. A good return for their tithing. My Roman Catholic family happily attended the voluntary pre-breakfast homilies each morning. Topics included one speaker's experience with horses, snakes and a rare albino pet skunk. The meditations concluded with an Aesop-like application of lessons learned from the secular world to the Kingdom of God and then a grace before meals. Religion was distinctly low-key. But all conference center services, we gathered, ground to bare minima on the Sabbath, from sunset Friday evenings to sunset Saturday evenings. We were lucky enough to be on hand our first evening (Sunday) for a large wedding built around local people. Our immersion in local twangs was deep and pleasant. Meals were generally buffets or box lunches and included meat. Alcohol was not permitted on the grounds. Smoking was forbidden in the bedrooms and punished by a fine ($500 if memory serves). BOTTOM LINE: Trust Cohutta Springs Conference Center and Youth Camp to deliver what they promise at reasonable cost, including unremarkable but nutritious meals. Security is strong. The gates are shut at 11:00 p.m. The staff inspire confidence. The Conference Center's extensive, year round adult-only elderhostels, more familiar to my wife and me than this our first intergenerational one, are kept deliberately small (between a preferred upper limit of 12 participants up to a reluctantly accepted 18 elderhostelers). Those small numbers, in my opinion, are worth paying a little extra for. We are looking into a November 2009 elderhostel at Cohutta Springs for adults focusing on contemporary crime-solving techniques. New to me at our Cohutta Springs intergenerational elderhostel were terms like "PFD" (personal flotation device meaning a life jacket) and "banana boats," sampled by all kids and six courageous grannies eager not to be tossed off into our lake, along with activities like canoeing and whitewater rafting. Mary and I look forward to future returns to Cohutta Springs, either just the pair of us or escorting a grandchild or two. -OOO-  |
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