"Riverweek is the best camp on the Hudson."

A strong claim, indeed, but it's straight from the mouth of a young environmentalist who recently took part in Historic Hudson Valley's Riverweek summer camp at Van Cortlandt Manor.

A new program launched this year, Riverweek was designed by HHV's camp gurus to complement the organization's existing Summerweek programs, which are for children ages 9-11 and take place at Sunnyside and Philipsburg Manor, as well as Van Cortlandt Manor.

Riverweek, however, which is dedicated to the history of the Hudson and Croton Rivers as well as modern lessons about conservation and preservation, is for the 11- 13-year-old set.

"So many of our students who stay with us for three years in Summerweek asked us for a camp for older kids that we just had to respond," said Danielle Fontaine, camp manager. "They wanted something that was different and challenging but still featured the historic immersion experience that defines Summerweek."

This year's pilot Riverweek program, a collaboration with Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, was by all measures a huge success, said Danielle, who you can see in the top photo (she's the one with the ponytail.)

In an exit survey, a whopping 100% of the campers (yes, that means all of them) said they would want to return and repeat the program next year and would highly recommend the program to their friends.

Now that's impressive!

Activities ranged from the artistic (like creating the brightly colored carp shown above) to the crafty (like building wooden boats, also shown above).

More on Riverweek to come...

Yes, those of us in the digerati generation enjoy blogging and Facebooking and Twittering and yes, we spend way too much reading about random things online like frozen-food reviews and rants from angry journalists, but we nonetheless love books. I mean, really love books, and yes, I mean the dead-tree variety that you can actually hold, spill coffee on, and impress your friends with when said books are sufficiently large and/or esoteric and arranged just so on the living room table.

And back when the TRS-80 was just a mere gleam in our young and soon-to-be pixel-stuffed and dry eyes, we spent hours and hours and days with books.

It's a part of growing up that has not changed, despite the ability to download an entire season of Family Guy onto a device the size of a slice of melba toast.

On September 28, the community at Washington Irving's Sunnyside, our "founding father of literature" will be celebrating children's books with an event called (fittingly) Celebrate Children's Book Day. It's an annual occurrence and it's hugely popular, proving that reports of the death of books are greatly exaggerated.

Sunnyside will be hosting more than 60 children's book authors and illustrators, so young fans get to interact with them and get their favorite books signed.

I just learned that new participants this year will include Hudson Talbott, author/illustrator of United Tweets of America, Jerry Smath, author/illustrator of But No Elephants, Jerry Craft, author/illustrator of Mama's Boyz, Leslie Kimmelman, author of Everybody Bonjours!, Elise Broach, author of Shakespeare's Secret, Robert Casilla, illustrator of A Picture Book of Jackie Robinson, Ida Pearle, author/illustrator of Child's Day, and Daniel Mahoney, author/illustrator of A Really Good Snowman.