This is different from my childhood

Sometimes I wonder if I'm significantly more ignorant of the world around me than I'd like to admit. After having read this article, this is one of those times.

Gov. Paul LePage of Maine happened to be waiting for his flight at Augusta State Airport on a recent Saturday when the weekend crush began.

A turboprop Pilatus PC-12 carrying Melissa Thomas, her daughter, her daughter’s friend and a pile of lacrosse equipment took off for their home in Connecticut, following the girls’ three-week stay at Camp All-Star in nearby Kents Hill, Me. Shortly after, a Cessna Citation Excel arrived, and a mother, a father and their 13-year-old daughter emerged carrying a pink sleeping bag and two large duffel bags, all headed to Camp Vega in Fayette.

“Love it, love it, love it,” Mr. LePage said of the private-plane traffic generated by summer camps. “I wish they’d stay a week while they’re here. This is a big business.”

For decades, parents in the Northeast who sent their children to summer camp faced the same arduous logistics of traveling long distances to remote towns in Maine, New Hampshire and upstate New York to pick up their children or to attend parents’ visiting day.

Now, even as the economy limps along, more of the nation’s wealthier families are cutting out the car ride and chartering planes to fly to summer camps. One private jet broker, Todd Rome of Blue Star Jets, said his summer-camp business had jumped 30 percent over the last year.

This weekend, a popular choice for visiting day at camps, private planes jammed the runways at small rural airports.

Officials at the airport in Augusta said 51 private planes arrived between Thursday and Saturday; on a normal day, they would expect just a few...

Alright, we'll take a break here so that I can say that I had no idea that there were people in the world who honestly took private planes (or put their kids on them) to send them to summer camp. The fact that this business has apparently jumped 30 percent in just the last year serves as yet another reminder of the vicious unevenness of the recent economic "recovery"--our chosen euphemism for the country's most recent failed attempt at supply-side economics.

We'll turn it back over to the source to make the next obvious point:

The popularity of private-plane travel is forcing many high-priced camps, where seven-week sessions can easily cost more than $10,000, to balance the habits of their parents against the ethos of simplicity the camps spend the summer promoting.

Kyle Courtiss, whose family runs Camp Vega in Maine, said that his staff was trained “to be cognizant of stuff like that” and that private planes were “not what this camp is about.”

Some camps said they recognized that the parents who flew in private planes were often strong financial supporters of these camps. Arleen Shepherd, director of Camp Skylemar, in Naples, Me., said that while some of the high-profile parents whose children attend Skylemar might fly privately, some campers had never flown on a plane.

Ah, yes. The flagrant hypocrisy and ironic contrast between private plane travel and the "ethos of simplicity" that summer camp promises to provide... But wait a second... hey Camp Vega (it's pronounced Vee-gah, not Vay-gah as I assumed, and it's an all-girls camp that refers to its campers as Vegans...cute)... really?!? You've got a $10k price tag for a 7-week summer camp, but yet you're "not about stuff like that"?! Please.

Now, I admit to not knowing exactly what my parents spent on my summer camp growing up (I did mostly sports camps rather than stereotypical log-cabin summer camps like Camp Vega), but I seem to recall the average weekly price tag being somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 to $300 (more for some, though I can't imagine that even the most "select" camp cost more than $500 a week, even with boarding included). Camp Vega, though, at $10k for the summer, clocks in just shy of $1500 a week, an absolutely staggering sum (even adjusted for a couple of decades of inflation).

When you slap a price tag like that on your camp, you lose all right to complain about your campers' (or their parents') perceived violation of the camp's mythical "ethos of simplicity". Real simplicity is cheap--honestly, it's free. Feigned simplicity for the purpose of profit, though--that's expensive. Just like private plane travel.

Get over yourselves, Camp Vega. You're as transparent and shallow as the parents who shell out thousands to get rid of their kids for the summer--and a couple thousand more to get rid of them more quickly. You deserve each other.

[NY Times]