Adventure Forest

Wednesday, 11 January 2012

One of the things we were trying to do yesterday was to get to a local mountain biking area which had a trail map and which looked quite good - but of course as we travel so slowly we only arrived there at 4pm.  And it turned out the mountain biking place was right next to this thing called 'Adventure Forest' which was a series of wires and nets and ladders and ropes strung between trees in this lovely little forest with ferns all over the forest floor.  There were kids and adults 10m up in the trees walking on wires, clambering over nets and doing lots of flying foxes.  It looked fun so we wandered in to investigate. As it was so late and it closed at 5pm I figured it wouldn't be possible to actually do anything what with safety demonstrations and all (we've done the Otway Fly recently so we have spent a lot of time doing the safety stuff!).  Anyway - it wasn't a problem that we were so late as after our 15 minute demonstration and practice, we were 10m up on our own. And I mean really on our own. It was completely 'self guided' so basically if we (including the kids) didn't clip into the right spots and move the carabinas correctly from point to point, we'd plummet to the (albeit soft) forest floor - one of the pictures there is of Jett clipping himself on.  gosh.   Anyway  - the whole experience was great fun and relatively cheap ($80 nz) for the family. If we'd been there earlier we could have done all of the courses which would have taken a good half a day or more but instead we did three of them and the next morning (after spending a pleasant night in the car park) we went back to do the last one Zali was able to do with her height limit - which has still left two to do next time. Fun.

So anyway, Jon didn't get to go riding until well after six o'clock and then he got a puncture 5 minutes later - so actually I got to go riding for an hour.  Unlike the adventure forest, the mtb area was a bit of a disappointment though as the tracks were either difficult or unmaintained or invisible or all of the above. - although to be fair it did have a hard act to follow!