Climbing And Abseiling Experience

Ok, so when I first decided that this might be fun, I had envisioned myself in a scene with Tom Cruise on Mission Impossible 3 where he was hanging on a mountain ledge. But obviously from the looks of the photo I did nothing of the kind. Still, it was a good enough vision for me to go ahead and book Groupons for the whole family to do some climbing and abseiling.

The day started early at 9am when we were directed to arrive at Strubensvalley Cliffs, where the climbing and abseiling were to be done. The group was not too big, in total there were 6 of us novices, and 4 of those were already part of my family :-) We had 2 instructors who taught us how to look and position ourselves whilst going up, and then how to push ourselves off the rocky cliff whilst coming down.

At first we did a very simple climb, probably not even higher than about 30 feet. Just so we could get used to the feeling of climbing and pushing ourselves up. And once we've reached the top, we had to abseil down (meaning we had to bounce ourselves off the rock like they do on films with police breaking into windows from above using nothing but a rope).

Then we went onto something a bit more harder with a height of just over 40 feet. The rock was more difficult to climb up from but the abseiling was more enjoyable as there was more distance to come down to.

Hubby and eldest were really impressed with the whole experience. I was really amazed that I enjoyed the climb more than the abseiling (maybe it was because I had two left feet and just couldn't get the right way to go down). Youngest, although slightly happy, was a bit frustrated as she was not able to finish the second climb because it was just too high for her.

The experience finished at 12 noon just in time for us to hit lunch and replenish our energies.

Another family experience courtesy of Groupon (wanna know more? see my previous post) and Soul Adventures, the people who provided the experience. Something different definitely.

For more info, visit their website.