Transportation
Some campers live close enough to camp to travel here on their own two feet. Others living in Rockland or Bergen Counties come to us by car. Over half of our campers get to The Nature Place by riding the bus, making nature and the magic of camp accessible to those living in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Westchester, Hoboken, and Montclair, and to families living in Bergen County who’ve opted to use bus transportation.
Bus Experience
Each Nature Place bus has a bus counselor riding with campers, in addition to the bus driver (some of our buses have two bus counselors). The bus counselor’s role is important, and falls into three general categories:
- Supervision of campers on the bus, attendance, clear and safe dismissal procedures
- Fun! Counselors lead games, songs, puzzles, nature scavenger hunts up the palisades parkway, and more
- Communication with parents: Counselors will contact parents if the bus is stuck in traffic, if we’re waiting at a stop for you and your camper, really if there’s anything that should be communicated to parents regarding the bus and logistics
How We Design Our Bus Routes
For summer 2022 our bus routes will be designed to minimize time on the bus and risk of COVID-19 exposure, i.e. less stops and less campers on each bus.
We’ve designed our bus transportation to utilize centralized pickup stops, rather than door-to-door pickup. Over the past 20 + years of busing children to camp we’ve found that this method of pickup and drop off ensures a shorter ride than what would be possible if we bused door-to-door.
Because of this, we move our bus routes and stops around a little bit each summer season, based on each of our customer’s locations. By doing this we’re constantly refining the best possible balance between centrally located stops, convenient to as many families as possible, with a bus ride that is also as short as possible for our campers.
We send out all busing information close to the start of camp, in early/mid June. You can see this past summer’s bus routes and stops above. Know that while details will shift a little every season, what you see should provide a good general picture of our bus routes, stops, and times.
We work with Chestnut Ridge Transportation (as we have for over 20 years) for all our daily buses to and from camp as well as for our offsite hiking and camping trips.
