Life As Nutz: Campout Crazies

This past weekend was the Duke GPSC Campout for Duke Basketball season tickets. The rules are simple, make it through the weekend (36 hours) without missing two attendance checks and your name is entered into a lottery for tickets. Over the years the students have fine-tuned the art of Campout and it includes a lot of RVs, U-HAULs, tents, beer and drinking games. Staying awake for 36 hours is not necessarily the problem for most students. Staying sober enough to listen for and report to each check-in is the difficult part. To help with that challenge and also to increase their chances of getting tickets, students form teams.

Cameron joined a team of about 30 people that rented two U-HAULs and one RV. They shared expenses so that there would be plenty of food and drink for the duration of Campout and they stayed alert by doing night shifts and buddying up. People dropped like flies throughout the weekend making this the worst year for dropouts ever (2600 registered, 1200 made it to the end). When Sunday morning rolled around Cameron's team was no exception with maybe 14 people still standing. Thankfully, of those people about half were chosen in the lottery to receive tickets.

That green tent marked Cam's home for the weekend

The next step is for those 14 or so people to get back together and in a draft-like fashion they pool the tickets, split costs, and select games. Of course the ticket winners get first dibs on the biggest game of the season, UNC, but it's a really fair way to make sure that everyone gets to enjoy Duke Basketball. The weekend was an unforgettable experience and Coach K and the Men's Basketball team even made an appearance to show the fans their appreciation.

We've got our gear ready to go and I finally got to wear my Cameron Crazie shirt last night when I visited the gang. Check out the pictures. Hopefully my fellow Partners have some pictures of us ladies together. If so, please post on Facebook :-)