Have you ever gone to a ropes course before? If you haven’t yet, and you like teamwork and fun, you should try it if you can. It is so fun and challenging and you need teamwork to solve some of them. You also learn new strategies every time you try again when you fall off or do it wrong.  Today, I will write about my experience at the Bedford Ropes Course and what happened and what we learned when doing it.

I’m going to talk about my three favorite challenges at the ropes course. My first favorite was the Indiana Jones Challenge but it was really challenging and you REALLY needed a good strategy like when you get on the thin beam, scoot on it with your butt and not walk on it in case you fell from losing your balance.The goal was to go around the whole entire thing and ask your teammates that had gone through for tips on how you do it. You also needed to be careful about where you were stepping because if you stepped somewhere that was in thin air and not the beam then BOOM! You would fall down to the ground. You definitely need to keep your balance or else you will fall flat on your feet or if you were getting on to something like a beam, you fall and hurt yourself pretty badly (I kind of did). You need to do it slowly in order to steady yourself and keep in balance, remember, patience is key. (The thing is though I only got to the beams because I fell at the last beam so I only got through that so if you ever go there, good luck on the other parts!) We tried to ask the people that had gone through the beams if they could tell us how they did it but they were focusing on the wire part and they couldn’t here us from where they were.  My second favorite is the Rope Bridge Challenge, the goal is that we really need to be patient on this one because we were not allowed to accidentally touch other people or the ground because then we would be out and would have to start all over again, so we needed to bend over and walk over the people that were bending their bodies and we had to do it slowly. The goal was to go touch the tree on the other team’s side and the other team were trying to touch our tree (there was no winning or losing thing, it was just teamwork with the whole team but we had to split into two groups). You had to be careful and communicate like saying “Can you bend over?” or “I will bend over” and similar things. You also really need to be patient so that you don’t accidentally run into someone or do something too fast so that you could still stay on and not be out. My third favorite is the Mohawk Walk. The goal was to get your group to a black square by walking on wires that was securely connected on to trees. At first, my group butt scooted (scooting on their butt) since we couldn’t balance on the wires but then one of us came up with this idea of while walking on the wires, we could hold hands and the person near the tree, clinging on to the dear life of EVERYBODY, to balance ourselves, but that didn’t exactly go as we planned, because after all people were on the tree, we were stuck there so people kept shouting “Help!” and “Scoot slowly!” and “But I can’t!” and things like that. So we just continued to butt scoot. The only problem (well, two actually) was it was SO painful that people started saying ouch while butt scooting. Another was flipping over and upside down. Since we did not have helmets, people clung on to for avoidance of their head cracking apart, even though that definitely wouldn’t happen. In the middle, people were allowed to come off and help other people even though we didn’t know how to help them most of the time. At the end, I was thinking how do people make things look so easy? Especially this one! 

I learned A LOT of things. Not a lot but A LOT as in A LOT LOT (basically very very much). I have a feeling that other people in the grade also learned A LOT that maybe we could even win a prize for “grade that has learned the most things in 24 hours”. I’m going to name three so that this blog post isn’t 1,000,000,000,000 pages long (I even doubt that all that I learned isn’t that long but I guess it would still be very long). First, I learned that YOU NEED PATIENCE, it is very important because you can never get anything done by rushing. For example, if you rushed through the WHOLE ENTIRE ropes course, by the time you come back, you will be bruised and scratched, a sprained ankle and maybe even a broken leg! Second thing is you should encourage your teammates so they will feel more confident (it did not happen with me but I saw my teammates feel good about themselves so I encouraged people a few times though I regret not doing it a lot). Third thing is to find a strategy, like, if you fall off it’s ok just remember what you did wrong and don’t or, if not possible, try not to do it again. Also remember to think of new ways if you tried something over and over again and it did not work.

So my time was actually pretty enjoyable (except for that part we don’t talk about), I learned A LOT of things as I said and my team got through the challenges pretty good, but there were parts it was still very challenging. Maybe you can go there and try to come up with better strategies.                                        (some pictures are not my group)