It’s roughly 10 AM on Memorial Day Monday. The pools opened Saturday. The graduation lawn signs are listing slightly. Somewhere on a back patio in Lafayette, a parent is on their second iced coffee, looking at a shared Google Sheet titled SUMMER 2026 - FINAL (v7).xlsx, and quietly losing their mind.
The kids haven’t even finished school yet. Most districts wrap on June 11. But the real summer — the camp summer, the logistics summer, the “wait who’s driving on Wednesday at 2:45” summer — starts in approximately fourteen days. And the spreadsheet, frankly, still has gaps.
Welcome to camp season. If you live here and you have kids, this is the busiest non-event of your year.
The February Sprint
To understand June, you have to understand February. February is when Lamorinda’s most popular camps open registration, and February is when, every year, the following thing happens:
A parent (it is, statistically, mostly moms) sets four browser tabs, two phones, an iPad, and a laptop side-by-side at the kitchen counter at 8:58 AM on a Tuesday. At 9:00:00 sharp, registration opens for Roughing It Day Camp, Camp Galileo, the City of Lafayette rec camps, and that one specific week of the Town Hall Theatre intensive that their kid actually loves.
By 9:04, three of those four are sold out. The parent will have successfully registered for two camps, missed one, and gotten waitlisted on a fourth. They will text their partner: “GOT WEEK 3 AND 6. NEED TO FIGURE OUT WEEK 2, 4, 5, 7, 8.”
It is now February. The kid is at school. The camps are eight months away. And we are already behind.
The Jigsaw
There are, depending on how you count, roughly ten weeks of summer between the last day of school and the first day of school. Every one of those weeks needs a plan. Here’s the math:
- Week 1 (mid-June): “Decompression week.” The kid is feral. They watch Bluey. You let them. You feel briefly relaxed.
- Weeks 2-3: First “real” camp. Usually something local — Lafayette Rec, Moraga Town, Orinda’s Curiosity Quest. Drop-off 9 AM, pickup 3 PM. You can work a half-day.
- Week 4: Sleepaway. Camp Tuolumne. Camp Tawonga. Or the YMCA option up at Loma Mar. You will cry in the parking lot on drop-off. You will get one (1) blurry text photo at midweek. This is fine.
- Week 5: Disaster week. This is the week with no camp. You forgot. You’ll figure it out. (You will not figure it out. You will trade play dates with three other families like a small hostage exchange.)
- Week 6: The specialty camp. Coding at iD Tech. Theater at Town Hall. Sports academy. The kid has been talking about this since April.
- Week 7: Family vacation. The one you actually planned in February. Tahoe, Hawaii, or — for the truly committed — the August Italy trip.
- Week 8: Another disaster week, but you’re tougher now. The neighbors are also out. You order pizza four times.
- Week 9: Sports camp. Lamorinda Soccer Club. Basketball Academy. Tennis. Lacrosse. The schedule is brutal. The kid is, somehow, thriving.
- Week 10 (mid-August): “Reset week.” School is in 7 days. You’re trying to fix the sleep schedule. The kid has rediscovered the iPad. It’s not going well.
Multiply this by each kid you have and each kid’s own preferences, then carrier-pigeon the result around to coordinate with three other families doing carpools. This is why the spreadsheet has tabs.
The Camp Hierarchy
Lamorinda summer camps fall into a quiet hierarchy that nobody will admit to but everyone respects:
- The Legacy Camps. Roughing It, at the Lafayette Reservoir, since 1972. Three generations of families have done it. There’s a song. There’s a war canoe. The waitlist is real. If your kid does Roughing It, you do not have to justify it to anyone.
- The Innovation Tier. Camp Galileo, Steve & Kate’s, Destination Science. Branded, glossy, parents-love-it-because-it-photographs-well. The kids do, in fact, love it.
- The Rec Camps. City of Lafayette, Town of Moraga, City of Orinda. Affordable, walkable, your kid will know everyone. The unsung MVPs of the summer.
- The Sport-Specific Burner. Soccer, basketball, volleyball, lax. Half-day, intense, your kid sleeps for ten hours that night. You get nothing else done because pickup is at 12:30.
- The Arts Camps. Town Hall Theatre, Art Room, Cal Shakes. Quiet success stories. The kids come home dramatic. We don’t mind.
- The “We’re Trying This” camp. Coding, chess, robotics, falconry (don’t ask). Half-experiment, half-Hail Mary. Sometimes it’s the best week of the summer.
- The Sleepaway. A category unto itself. The phones-off, parents-detached, weeklong rite of passage that produces every Lamorinda kid’s first lanyard.
There is no “wrong” camp. There is, however, definitely a camp the cool kids in your kid’s class are all going to, and you found out in April, and there are no spots left. This is fine. You will survive.
The Hidden Camps
The local insiders know about the hidden options:
- The Lafayette Library summer programs — free, weekly, perfectly fine for two hours on a Wednesday.
- The Moraga Commons movie nights — not technically camp, but it counts.
- The Soda Center summer swim — bundled with OMPA. The kids are at the pool anyway.
- The “neighbor with a backyard pool” arrangement — informal, glorious, the best camp money can’t buy.
The Drop-Off Choreography
Camp drop-off, especially for the morning rec sessions at the Lafayette Community Center or Moraga’s Hacienda, is its own thing. By Week 2, you’ve identified the parents you can rely on for an emergency pickup. By Week 4, there’s a WhatsApp group named something like “Camp Galileo Carpool 2026 🌞.” By Week 6, you are running it.
The parking lot at 8:55 AM, every single Lamorinda camp morning: Subarus, Volvos, three Rivians, a Tesla still warm from charging, and one minivan with a “Coexist” bumper sticker that has been there since 2018.
The Cost Conversation
Let’s be honest about it. A week of Lamorinda day camp runs $450-$900. The brand-name innovation camps push higher. Sleepaway is $1,500-$3,500/week. Multiply by ten weeks, multiply by however many kids, and the family camp budget for the summer is — for a meaningful number of households — somewhere between a used car and a kitchen remodel.
There are scholarships at several rec camps. There are early-bird discounts. There are sibling deals. There is the savvy parent who books only six weeks and just handles the other four with grandparents, cousins, and a generous use of the Lafayette Reservoir trail and a Stanley tumbler.
That parent, frankly, has it figured out.
The Quiet Reward
The thing about Lamorinda summer is that despite all of this — the spreadsheet, the carpool group chats, the missed weeks, the Memorial Day panic that the plan has holes in it — the kids have the best summer of their lives. They’re outside. They’re with friends. They smell like sunscreen and chlorine from Tuesday to Sunday. They get tan and brave and a little bit feral. They learn to lose at tetherball. They make a lanyard. They sleep hard.
And in mid-August, when you sit on your back patio with your iced coffee and watch them argue with their sibling about who gets the last popsicle, you’ll forget about the Week 5 disaster and the over-budget specialty camp and the WhatsApp group you accidentally muted.
You’ll just see the summer. The real one. The one that’s two weeks away.
Pool’s open. Sunscreen’s on the counter. Spreadsheet has fourteen days to get its act together. See you at drop-off.
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