For Teens With Means, Camp Isn't a Cabin -- It's the Caribbean

As adult Washington works this summer, its children, the more affluent ones at least, will be sipping yak butter tea with Chinese nomads, sailing the Caribbean on million-dollar schooners, scuba diving in Hawaii and studying for the SAT -- in Australia.

And that's after the middle school class trip to Costa Rica.

Travel and camp options for youths have grown astonishingly exotic, leaving parents a little jealous and their children, well, sated. "I don't know if anything can top the Galapagos," 18-year-old Danny Feuer of Bethesda said before heading off on his fourth teen trip.

"Parents used to just think, 'Come home with the same 10 fingers and 10 toes we sent you with,' " said Jeffrey Solomon, executive director of the National Camp Association, which refers families to programs. "Today, summer camp really reflects that parents are more and more driven to get their kids ahead and enrich them with various activities."

Camp consultants and directors figure that given the difficulty of getting into top colleges, young people are more pressed to build extraordinary résumés. They also attribute the proliferation of summer adventures to the combination of travel savvy upper-middle-class parents with growing chunks of disposable income and children with shrinking attention spans and a corresponding need for stimulation.

Children start camp earlier in life, too, meaning they tire of it earlier and in some cases swap tie-dyeing for whale watching by age 11.

Day camp was too much like school for Lizzie Bunnen of Bethesda -- every day the same routine. As for sleep-away camp, "it was just a little boring," she said.

The summer before ninth grade, "I wanted to get out of the country and see what was there," said Bunnen, now 17. So on a month-long trip during which she lived with a family in Costa Rica, she built mountain trails, relaxed at the beach and explored the markets of San Jose. The following summer she went to Idaho, where the kids tore down barbed-wire fences that were "killing some animal. I forget which." The summer after that was Spain, touring cities and clubbing, painting buildings and climbing another mountain.

"No one got in fights," she said about Spain, her best trip, "and it was just beautiful there."

Community service programs are hot, directors say, partly because of volunteer requirements such as those in Maryland and D.C. public schools. Adventure sports travel is big, as is cultural and language immersion, particularly in Spanish-speaking countries.

Waiting lists are long for Hawaii and Alaska, for anything in Australia and anything college prep. (Musiker Discovery Programs, a Long Island, N.Y.-based company, combined the latter two in a $7,000 month of travel and SAT classes. Why study at your dining room table when you can do it Down Under?)

The itineraries are enough to dazzle even well-traveled parents, who are home working to pay the $1,000 to $2,000 a week that some of these programs cost -- putting the trips out of reach of lower-income families. "I look at these ridiculous camp excursions and say, 'Where are the ones for the moms?' " said Bunnen's mom, Meg Crowlie.

The number of children attending camp grew from 5 million in 2001 to 6.2 million last summer, according to the National Camp Association. Although the popularity of traditional bug-juice camps endures, specialty programs make up a growing share of summer offerings, as much as 30 percent. The programs include not just expensive travel but also camps targeting an increasingly broad range of special interests, including disc-jockeying, modeling and video game design.

In response, traditional camps are offering far more than the usual fare. Many day camps have morphed into a series of field trips -- to ballgames, skating rinks and amusement park after amusement park. Whereas once you might have left sleep-away camp one night for sundaes at Friendly's, now you get a week watching Broadway shows or white-water rafting.