At camp, we are proud of our nutritious and diverse meals that fuel your campers! Take a look at our menus of the day!
We start our day strong with breakfast!
In addition to our daily selections of creamy oatmeal and toppings, fresh fruit medley, a toast bar, and scrambled eggs with salsa and cheddar, every morning at breakfast we serve featured breakfast menu items! To start off Term 2 we’ve enjoyed:
Monday, June 15th:
Tuesday, June 16th:
We refuel midday with lunch!
For lunch, we always have a salad bar, sandwich station, and buttered noodles open to our campers! Additionally, they’ve enjoyed:
Monday, June 15th:
Tuesday, June 16th:
We round out the day with dinner!
At dinner, our campers again enjoy our fresh salad bar, sandwich station, and buttered noodles! We’ve also had:
Sunday, June 14th:
Monday, June 15th:
Tuesday, June 16th:
Every morning after breakfast, our campers start their day off with Team Competition, AKA “Team Comp”. This friendly competition includes games like kickball, mini soccer, O-Ball, Nuke Em, and Steal the Bacon. The winners of each game earn their respective teams (Rough Riders and Silver Spurs vs. Texas Rangers and Lone Stars) points toward a head start for our highly anticipated Amazing Race at the end of the term.
Our current team competition score is: Texas Rangers and Lonestars: 6 Rough Riders and Silver Spurs: 6
A tie to round out our second full day of camp!
06/16 - Watercolor should be fun and surprising! We start the class with a game of 7 second animal, where you have to draw a surprise animal at the speed of light. Once properly warmed up, we played with adding paint to puddles of water to see how the color moves outside our control. We then worked on 2-3 postcard sized paintings of flowers and peaches, observing from life, learning about value scales and how to be patient while layering color. Lastly we returned to our puddle paintings, which dry in unexpected ways, and added another layer of color… And that’s on growth!
At Camp Balcones Springs, we pass along many traditions, stories, and legends to our campers and counselors each year. However, perhaps no CBS lore is bigger than our camp teams and our Team Initiation ceremony. All campers and staff who enter the Camp Balcones Springs gates are initiated into one of four teams – for boy campers, either the Texas Rangers or Rough Riders, and for girl campers, either the Lonestars or Silver Spurs. The Texas Rangers wear red, shout the famous “Five Bullets Baby!” cheer, and are brothers with the Lonestars, who wear green and have a litany of cheers, including the famous “Lone Star Love!” yell. The Rough Riders wear blue and throw up the notorious “Tatonka” hand gesture that resembles the horns of a bull. The Silver Spurs are the Rough Riders’ sister team, sport purple and, like the Lonestars, possess an impressive library of cheers, including the always intimidating “ching ching ching” – whispered softly to mimic the sound of spurs clashing against boots on horseback.
During Team Initiation, which takes place the first night of each session of camp, campers gather together in the Grid Iron (our big covered pavilion) to hear the legend of how the camp teams began. In the distance, campers watch as the team legends – four figures dressed in western garb – travel across the field silently on horseback. Team sponsors – counselors who act as team mascots for each term – line up in front of the campers as the story is told. Each new camper is given a paper bag with their name on it. Inside these bags, a branded wooden block reveals the camper’s new team. Once the narrator finishes, old campers are instructed to go join their sponsors on the field. Now, only new campers remain in the GridIron. New campers are then told to open their bags and go join their new teams!
What happens next is a bit of a secret – sponsors and counselors lead old and new campers alike to their respective team hideouts – top secret locations across camp where new campers are initiated into their teams by learning new cheers, secret handshakes, and each team’s code of ethics and values.
Campers compete alongside their teams for the rest of the term in daily Team Comp tournaments and games, all leading up to the infamous Amazing Race relay event at the end of the term. One set of teams (either the Texas Rangers & Lonestars or Rough Riders & Silver Spurs) is declared the overall winner for each term based on how many points and wins they earn throughout the session. It’s not just a yearly challenge, though – campers will belong to the same camp team for every year they return to CBS going forward.