Day 88, 13th November 2011. Tauranga, New Zealand

We had to get up at 9.30am today, like the earliest we had got up the entire time in New Zealand lol. We got ready to go out, we were going to a place called the Adrenalin Forest, which is like Go Ape in the UK. If you don’t know what that is, it’s like a zip wire thing where you swing around in the trees. It was a Sunday, so Treena wasn’t working, so it was nice for all 4 of us to go together.

I actually don’t know where abouts the place was that we went to, but it was about a 40 minute drive away. It had just opened the day before, so we were some of the first people to try it out. When we arrived and were given our harnesses and everything, the people that worked there told us that there were 6 courses in total, and that nobody had completed them all yet. We laughed, wondering why people could think it was so hard, thinking that we would be the first people to complete the full course.

Once we started doing it, I realised it was not as fun as Go Ape, it wasn’t as high as I wanted it to be. If it would have been more higher up it would have been more thrilling. It was still good though, I love zip lines ad enjoyed trying to go as fast as I could on them. The thing that I didn’t like was that the zip lines were mixed in with climbing activities and hard balancing stuff that I am no good at. I just wanted to swing down zip lines and I had to do all these strenuous activities to get there.

Once we got onto the 4^th course, the zip lines got a bit better because they were higher up, but the other bits were getting harder and harder, I could not do them. I kept nearly falling down and hurting myself. It required so much upper body strength, that I just do not have. Gary and Fabian were doing really well with it because they are strong, but me and Treena were struggling.

At the end of the 4^th course, me and Treena couldn’t take any more because we had no strength to carry on. I would have loved to get to the highest zip lines, but without doing any of the hard stuff. Fabian also gave up because he doesn’t like heights. The total opposite of me, he could have physically done it but didn’t want to go up higher, and I wanted to go higher but didn’t have the strength to do it. It was so physically demanding I thought my arms were going to fall off.

Gary managed to get all the way to the end, I was very proud of him. A girl that had started the course a bit before us beat him to it though because she was in front, so he wasn’t the first person ever to complete the course. We had fun watching Gary complete the course and cheering him on. Some of the stuff he had to do looked really hard and I know I would have never made it, so I’m glad I gave up when I did.

Funny story: People in NZ seem to call zip lines ‘flying foxes’ and I kept hearing them all talk about flying foxes while we were there, and wondering why I wasn’t seeing any of these animals. HAHA. I thought they sounded really cute and was disappointed that everybody was seeing them apart from me.... then I realized LOL.

When Gary was all finished, we drove back to Tauranga, and stopped at the supermarket on the way to get some food for a BBQ this evening. When we got home we started getting all the food ready, and Fabian's parents came round for the BBQ and it was really nice. They bought their doggie with them, who was sweet, but she didn't get along with Archie, she was really boisterous with him so they had to be kept away from each other. 

The food was really good, more burgers haha! I really enjoyed it and we just didn't really do anything in the night, just watched TV, read, and played with the iPad, before going to bed.