Teen Camping Party -15yr- Smore Bar

So for my 15th birthday party I wanted to do something fun, but cheap so I decided on a camping party.

INVITATIONS: for the invitations I went online and found cute cards with a tent at the bottom of it I put the date, time, location etc. Also on the invitation was a list of things to bring which was: sleeping bag, extra blankets, pad for your sleeping bag, toiletries, towel, a pair of old clothes, pajamas, pillow etc. I was planning on having the people meet at my house and then drive them up in 2 vans to the campsite where the party will be held. Even though it is a sleepover party I decided to invite my guy friends and have them stay the night too. I sent out the invitations to 9 girls and 10 guys (I will be the 10th girl to even it out) It is nice to have even numbers. So a couple of days before the party me and my mom rented two 10-person tents at the local camping store. Renting the tents made it so much more cheaper than actually buying the tents. We filled the vans with our tents, tons of extra blankets, pads and pillows and all the food and set off.

DECORATIONS: for the decorations we didn't do too much considering we didn't want to decorate a campsite so we kept it small.

ACTIVITIES: The first thing we did when we got there was to see who could put up their tents the fastest the girls or the boys, it was a huge tent so it took each of us forever! Also I wanted to do a Survivor themed type of games. So I split us up into 10 groups of 2. I had ten different colored bandanas to represent each team. We picked the themes by pulling out a random colored bandana out of a box.

GAMES: the first game we did in the team was a scavenger hunt around the campsite. They were told to pick up a random list of things that my mom had created. We gave them 30 minutes  and whichever team came back with the most items won a king size candy bar. The second game we played was to eat candied bugs and other candy. I created a wooden wheel that you can spin and I put 10 different items on the wheel which was: Candied crickets, chocolate covered ants, larva, blood candy, urine candy samples, skittles, chocolate, starbursts, M&M's and sour candy. The idea was to have 5 good candy and 5 gross candy.

Each team had to spin the wheel and eat whatever they got, this kept going until all the teams dropped out cause they just couldn't come to eat it. That was so funny to watch. The last game was my mom had gotten 10 blocks of ice and put a gum ball inside each of them, each team had to melt the block of ice without breaking it get the gum ball out and blow a bubble. Since the gum ball was frozen it was almost impossible!

COSTUMES: we had the bandanas on and also I got some colored war paint so they could paint under there eyes for fun.

PARTY SNACKS: we had a table set up with a smore's bar. We had a bowl of marshmallows, tons of hershey's bars and grahams crackers all set up at this one table. We put 30 wooden roasting sticks also on that table. On the other table we put snacks out, chips, pretzels, fruit skewers and other things like that.Also I made a trail mix, but camp themed so I took golden grahams cereal, added mini marshmallows and small chocolate chunks and mixed that together. Everyone loved that because it just looked like mini smore's.   For dinner there was a fire pit so we made hamburgers and hotdogs. We put a cooler out filled with water, bottled sodas and fruit sodas so they were free to get them whenever they wanted.

CAKE: I decided that smore's would already be a lot so I just got cupcakes. I made a graham cracker crust then added chocolate cake to it, then baked that and made some marshmallow frosting and swirled that on the cupcake, then burned the top with a blow torch and finished it off with a piece of chocolate, those were a big hit. Everyone just hung around the camp fire for a couple of hours talking and stuff. Once we finished at the campfire the boys and girls each when into their tents where we talked for practically the whole night before we went to bed. In the morning we had cereal, cinnamon rolls, fruit, juice and bacon. I set out 20 mini boxes of cereal so people could help themselves.

After breakfast we packed up our tents and sleeping bags and left them there. When my mom was loading everything in the vans we went to the local baseball field and had a softball game. I brought bats, gloves, helmets and balls. That was a great way to end our day, then we piled back up in the vans and dropped everyone at their house.

FAVORS: I didn't wanna do anything too big so i let them keep their bandanas and gave everyone a little jar of candy to take with them. Overall the party was a big success and everyone had soo much fun and talked about it for weeks after.