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The article analyses French summer camps for schoolchildren from the point of view of the extraordinary spatial mobility it produces, in that it institutes a break with the usual urban, normative and relational framework in which the young people operate. What is the impact of this spatial mobility on the socialisation of teenagers from working-class suburbs who find themselves criss-crossing the French countryside at holiday times? The article shows that these managed vacations constitute both an ordeal and resources mobility. The presence of the group of adolescents and leaders—who share the same norms, codes and cultural references—institutes and mediates the confrontation with social, spatial and racial alterity. It attenuates symbolic violence and fosters an accumulation of not insignificant informal resources.