We are Forest Ambassadors.
It’s a bit cool.
It means that we get to go to Thetford forest to the forestry commission site there, and play on the stuff, for free. And talk about it lots, of course.
You may have noticed me tweeting a few weeks ago that we were doing just that. (How can it be a few weeks ago?? Someone is stealing days and weeks when I’m not looking.) Anyway, we went, we had a fantastic time, I took pictures, I took video, I came home, and I didn’t write it up immediately, the moment passed, and I am a bad blogger ambassador 🙁
Yes, this is me hanging my head in shame.
However, I’ll make up for it now by telling you how utterly fantastic forests are.
Thetford Forest is enormous. I did ask the site manager there how enormous it was, but it was such a huge number I forgot it immediately. (Bad blogger ambassador. Never going to get any paying gigs. Sigh.) The fun bit is quite large itself, and it has all sorts of entertainment value. There are playgrounds, there’s Go Ape, junior and full size, they have Segways, there’s bike hire and new this year there’s a fabulous sound trail to complement the existing sculpture trail and draw you out further into the trees. There’s a cafe and a takeaway place, so you can have a hot meal in the middle of your day without dealing with flasks (highly recommended at this time of year) and there is lots and lots of space for riding your own or hire bikes.
We arrived and met up with the site manager who showed us over to the Go Ape area, trying to tempt the children into taking part. They were unconvinced. So we explored a playground for a bit – saw what was the tallest pyramid slide in the UK when it was erected, though apparently there is another the same height somewhere now, and then went to play on the sound trail.
You wouldn’t think a few supersize outdoor musical instruments could hold the attention of the internet age child would you? You’d be wrong. All of the ambulatory children were utterly fascinated. The one in the wrap on my front seemed happy enough, so we played on all sorts of things. And I took video.
With my phone held the wrong way round, so although I uploaded it to google all ready to show it to you, it doesn’t seem to want to play.
Sob. I was really looking forward to showing you video of Small on the sound tiles. He had such a fantastic time.
However, that wasn’t anywhere near the end of our day.
We retired to the cafe to warm up – soup for me and Big, enormous hotdogs for Smallest and Small. Hot drink. Definitely needed. And then Big decided that she *would* go on Go Ape junior after all.
I was quite incredibly ludicrously proud of her.
The difference between junior and adult appeared to be twofold. The length of the course, and the fact that you don’t have to move your clip from wire to wire on the junior course. That seemed like a good idea to me. There are about 17 bridges between platforms in the junior course and they vary from relatively solid looking bridges, to single wire for you to edge along. Big is scared of heights and she was up there alone. We were coaching from the ground, but there’s only so many times you can yell “you’re doing great” or give thumbs up.
Did I mention the being very very proud of her?
I’m not convinced I could do it myself. I intend to try, sometime when I don’t have a small child strapped to me. You can hold me to that if you like.
We’d also like to go back and try the segways but Small isn’t big enough yet. You’ve got to be 10 and 7 1/2 stone minimum. He gets to 10 in May, but I think it might be another couple of years before he hits the target weight, even fully clothed. He’s just not a hefty child. And the bike hire – turns out that you can’t take babies under 1 on a hire bike, so although we’d hoped to try them out, we couldn’t. Still, Tigerboy will be 1 in March, so we’ll just have to go back in the spring.
This is really quite a long post now. I think I’ll finish off with a few pictures.
OK, that’s one picture. The rest are over here on G+, and when I work out how to retrieve them from there, I’ll add them to this post. Sigh.
Linked up to Country kids with Coombe Mill
We had a fab day there at the beginning of September. Segway was very good, then we had breakfast, we hired bikes (except for C as we had taken hers to try and save money but actually would hire for her next time as the hire bikes are far better suited to the trails, her bike doesn’t have knobbly enough tyres), had a good lunch, explored the sound trail and slides. Was great. C wants to do Go Ape. But the big one so I need to go on too. It’s been a while and I’m not sure …
There was one bit of the big one that really put me off. The bit where you had to move your carabiner to a new wire then step off into the air and swing into a cargo net. Not sure I could do that. Do they have to have a parent up there? Could meet you there in spring and send the girls round together?
Can I Go Ape if I’m under 18 years old?
Under 18′s can’t swing in the trees on their own – they’ll need a Gorilla (over 18) to enjoy Go Ape too. Basically it’s one Gorilla to two Baboons (10 – 15 year olds) or one Gorilla to five Baboons (16 – 17 years). Your baboon stays with you at all times while you’re up in the trees.
Bother.
Sounds like you really made the most of your day. We went on Sunday to our local Forestry Commission woods for the review too. No Go Ape there sadly or mine would have been begging for a go too but it still made a good afternoon out and I will be using it for Country Kids this weekend, might just have to check I downloaded the photos OK now after your experience! I think I missed out not trying the cafe, it looked so delightful and all the posts I see say it was very reasonable, but not knowing it was there I had come prepared with apple cake and hot chocolate. Thank you for sharing your time at the woods on Country Kids.
Sounds like you had a really good time and actually the photos/video is just to make us go look for ourselves :O)
Something like that 😉
Thinking. We should get out more. And I should learn how to get photos onto g+ before how to get them off. Sigh. But a bit of fresh air might help, right?
There’s a thing called instant upload if you’re using an Android that just puts pictures on g+. Very good to keep things backed up as you go along too.