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Published: September 24th 2008
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High-ropes no1
Here you had to jump off a platform and then you swing into netting, which you then had to climb up onto the platform for the next activity. The gap to swing was about 10 metres. Another weekend has flown by, only 10 more weekends before we’re back again!
This was our first full weekend with company (other then each other of course)! And Mum and Dad seem to have brought the nice weather with them. Daniel wanted to tie them up and keep them here in order for the nice weather to carry on, but unfortunately, the weather knew they were planning on leaving so started raining on their last day here. Only 15 minutes of rain then, but now, since they’ve left, we have another day of rain again! 😞
Anyway, enough about weather, here’s what we’ve been up to:
Friday:
Today I went to work, knowing that everyone else in the audit team were going on a high-ropes course in the afternoon, but since I hadn’t been invited, I was prepared to have a boring afternoon. Once everyone was at work it was quite noticeable that I was the only one dressed in my business attire whereas everyone else was dressed in their casual attire, and a partner came over and invited me to go with the others - finally! They are a bit slack here and often I feel like
Flying through the air
...here's how you got down each course I am an inconvenience to them, either that or they are really, really disorganised. Anyway, on with the story…so someone took me home to get changed, and we all headed to ‘Go-Ape’, a big high-ropes course. I had lots of fun and it was quite good getting to finally see everyone in one place to realise that I did actually know most of them by now. The high ropes course consisted of one practice smaller course and four higher courses, each one getting higher in the trees than the previous one. You had to do each high-rope activity as they led on to the next one and so one. There were about 5-10 activities at each course and at the end of each course you got to ride down in a similar set up to a flying fox, except you attach yourself to the wire by a wire attached to your harness. I managed to land backwards at one of the courses so ended up with bark all through my socks and shoes, but luckily, not down my pants as other people had the please of experiencing!
The high ropes activities were lots of fun, hard to describe, you’ll have
to look at the pictures.
Saturday:
Today we headed into Guilford for some good old retail therapy. Mum had found some clothes that she liked so Dad and I went along to help her decide whether to get them or not. Daniel, being the clothes-loving-shopper that he is, of course went the other way, to the photo shop! His camera has been leaving lovely black spots over all the photos (yah for photo-shop software!) so he had to find a better method of cleaning it then what he was doing previously. (ps - no going back to our London photos to check out the quality of our photo shopping!)
Anyway, after lunch we took the train to the next town, Woking (pronounced Wooooooking, not Woking, as the good-old NZ’ers do!), and visited a massive craft superstore - hobbycrafts. There are over 32,000 product lines (no - I am not a store sales-rep), so Mum & I were in our element! Check out my photo down the stamp aisle! Look out girls, I’m now armed with more scrapbooking/cardmaking toys for our next craft afternoon!
Anyway, along with materials for knitting, cake decorating, quilting, flower arrangements, stamping, kids crafts, scrapbooking, wedding
Hobbycraft Superstore
Look at all the stamps!!!!! stuff, etc there were also a few things for boys - trains and models and puzzles. Not really enough to keep Daniel entertained, but with all the Lego-shops I’ve been dragged into, it’s only fair!
Sunday:
Today we took the train down to the South of England to a town by the sea with a pier, called….can you guess….yip, Brighton! The train was so packed that we ended up standing for an hour to get down there. Well, actually, I ended up standing while the other three were in a different carriage and managed to all get seats part way through the journey!
Once we all managed to pour out of the train, we followed the herds down to the beach. It’s a beach full of pebbles, with those lovely English deck-chairs that you can hire for the day.
The pier is impressive, not in length (since we’ve been on the longest pier in Western Australia, nothing else seems that impressive), but in activity. Halfway along the pier you go through this massive room full of game arcades, then you go out and walk along the pier again where there are food stands all up the middle and free
deck chairs full of people of either side, and then when you’re approaching the end of the pier you get a carnival with lots of theme rides. There’s a ghost train, a log-ride, merry-go-rounds, roller-coaster and more.
So now we can say we have been to Brighton Pier in two countries (except for Mum who can’t since she hasn’t even been to the one in Christchurch yet!).
We had a look through the town some more, including watching a triathlon that was going on near the sea.
We found the Royal Pavilion. I was expecting a little pavilion like the one from the Sound of Music that we saw earlier in our travels, but no, it’s a pile of massive buildings that look like an Indian church. The buildings look very impressive and magnificent, just like a Royal Palace. Apparently it was the seaside palace of George IV. There were signs everywhere telling people to look at the ‘regency splendour’ of the pavilion gardens - but all we saw were weeds and scraggly looking bushes! Maybe we were in the wrong area.
Anyway, after a while we decided to head home again. We managed to get some decent seats on
the train, going a slow different way home.
Monday:
Back to work again for me today. Home again at 4.30 (I’ve changed my hours from 9-5.30 to 8-4.30, they have a form of glide-time here, where you can work between those hours if you wish, and the bonus is that you actually get a desk!) and then dinner and the train station. It was sad to see Mum and Dad go as we’ve had a lot of fun with them, and it’s always nice to see familiar faces again. And it meant we were doomed to go back to gloomy, rainy days! Anyway, Mum & Dad managed to take home some extra possessions of ours that we have managed to acquire along the way, so that is quite helpful.
We took my parents down to the train station, equipped with a map of the underground and timetables of the trains to catch, and waved good-bye.
Now it’s back to a quiet flat, well, not so quiet if you hear the guy downstairs with his booming bass line from his rock music, and the jabbering English couple upstairs!
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Rochelle
non-member comment
me again!
at the end of the pier - did you see the scary high ride that hangs out over the sea and spins the person up and down? Brandt went on that when we went to Brighton, and I was thinking it looked a bit dodgy, and a few weeks later we heard that people had died as the thing fell apart!!!!!