As it was Mr K’s turn to take the slippery slope into his 30’s, I embarked on a cloak and dagger birthday planning operation – codename ‘codger’.
I secretly booked and planned and organised last Friday (his birthday was Monday – never say I don’t leave lots of time for things!). The two small impractical dogs were spirited away to my posh friend’s house where they couldn’t believe their luck, the children were warned that their Grandad would be attempting to keep them alive for the night, clothes were discretely packed and the GPS programmed with names like ‘Location 1’ and ‘Location 2 to 3’ and so on.
And so, when his birthday dawned bright and a little too early, we quickly ditched the various children with their childcare establishments and fled to the Lakes (aka, ‘location 1’). Mr K was gratifyingly surprised when we checked into little cottage B+B and amusingly baffled when I said that we were going to be doing something called ‘Go Ape’ (www.goape.co.uk) in the nearby forest.
For those of you unfamiliar with Go Ape, it is a sort of adventure playground for grown ups. Basically, they take lots of tall trees and build platforms near the top of them, then they use a series of terrifyingly flimsy-looking ways of connecting the platforms… rope bridge, tightropes, swings, simply jumping off into nothing…etc. At the end of each series of linked trees there is a zip-wire that takes you back to the ground (sweet, sweet ground!). The bits you clamber about on are as high as 70 feet off of the ground so the stomach lurching toe curling terror or standing on a little wooden platform with completely empty air all around is really not to be underestimated.
Fun though, honestly. By the end I’d been doing it for nearly three hours and I was completely beyond the point of being scared. I had a ten minute wait at one point while Mr K messed around on a cargo net and I was quite merrily playing about on a single wire tightrope for most of it. Hmm…. What happens if I do it backwards?… what about hopping?… etc.
Yes, I was a bit achey the next day and yes, fair enough, if you suffer from a genuine fear of heights then it really wouldn’t be for you (I don’t have a fear of heights but I don’t mind admitting that there was at least one point when I thought about climbing down and just going for a nice meal or something rather than jumping off of a 70 foot high platform and trusting that my safety wire would work) but all things being equal… I recommend it heartily. I’d love to do it again.
That night, resisting the post go-ape urge to just sleep, we had a nice meal out at a local pub ‘half a mile down the road’ (aka just over twice that in real life). Three sheets to the wind we stumbled home down an implausibly dark road with more stars overhead than I think I’ve ever seen.
The next morning we debated going back and trying go-ape again, but sense prevailed and we headed off to our next engagement… an hour of quad biking at a place called ‘Rookin House’, still in the lakes. It’s the most mental place ever, and we giggled ourselves into fits when we realised that full extent of the number of activities one can undertake there… quadbiking, amphibious army truck driving, horse riding, fishing, archery, clay pigeon shooting, go-karts, human bowling, blindfolded car driving, Argo-cat driving… etc (yes, there really IS and ‘etc’). But I’d already booked the quads, so that’s what we were going to do.
Excitingly, while we were waiting for the quad biking to start, Linda Robson (the blond one from Birds of a Feather) turned up to do clay pigeon shooting. I kindly ignored her but Mr K looses all dignity in the face of famous folk and mugged over at her like a fool.
After being issued with stupid hats and boots, we were lead out to our quad bikes. They’re big. Bigger than they look on TV. And louder and, frankly, very very hard to control. I found steering at the same time as managing the throttle really tricky and I quickly realised I was going to be the hopeless girl that held up the group. I winced as we bounced like maniacs over the absurdly rough and muddy terrain, I veered wildly to the right at one point and had to be rescued from a small pond. Then my poor throttle control meant that my bike stalled. Then I steered a little too far to the left and the whole left hand side of my quad disappeared into a peat bog. I got off and prepared to help pull it out but the guide pointed me away. ‘Just go over there’ she said in exasperation and then, cringe, made all the men on the tour get off their quads and come and help her get mine out. The men were covered in mud, my bike was rescued and recovered but my ego never did. I grimly guided my bike round the rest of the course without incident and leapt off gratefully at the end.
Words can’t describe the pain I was in the next day though when I realised that I’d compensated for the bumpiness of the quad biking by tensing my left thigh for the whole hour.
Ouch. Anyway, unless you are a burly man type, I would not recommend the quad biking
