Bri’s Blog:

Last week I returned from an entire week away with all the grade 8 classes in England’s Lake District…I dreaded leaving for a week of roughing it in nature but soon learned it was going to be an adventure I’d love and would never forget! Here are the highlights:

The flight to England was awesome. My best friend Lucas, whipped a candy across the plane and hit my other friend Julia in the eyeball which started bleeding…that was intense for a little while. Her dad is also the principal.  We had the plane all to ourselves because it was booked just for this trip. So 120 kids and 6 teachers until we met up with the Outward Bound leaders.

We got into our groups when we first got there and that night we were told to dress in something that could get wet….and once it was dark and cold out, they blindfolded us and walked us straight into the lake without knowing where we were going. I was the first in the group to touch the water and shouted “WATER!” and everyone else started backing away from the camp person leading them. I decided to be brave and charge in, so I took off my blindfold and ran into the lake anyway! After that, everyone jumped in and we couldn’t believe we were in the lake in all of our clothes!

They woke us up every morning with a loud instrument outside our doors at 6:30am…I wanted to shoot myself. We would have breakfast and shower and then meet with our groups to go off and do a different challenge each day. Then from 4:30pm-6:00pm we had free time, and then another hour of activities after dinner before free time and bed.

We had to share cabins with our ‘advisory group’ – which is like our home room at school. Only 6 girls in that class with me and one of them is a good friend, Ellie (from Ottawa!).

There were group challenges each day. Two of them were Jacob’s ladder and climbing a 3 metre wall without a ladder, rope or anything else. Our group of 14 did it in 1 minute and 21 seconds!

The hardest challenge was doing a mountain hike with a huge 25 lbs rucksack on my back for 2 days and camping out in a rain/wind storm. All of us wanted to jump off the side of the mountain – we were so exhausted and sore. That night we had to set up camp ourselves and only had our helmet lights on to see. It was so cold and windy and rainy that we felt like we were literally dying out there! It was the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. On this ‘expedition’ outing, we also had to eat mushy packages of ‘pre-cooked’ meals (that I called ‘sludge). It was usually cold because we couldn’t get a fire going in the rain to heat them up. It was really disgusting!

Another challenge was gorge walking and rock climbing straight up a waterfall, getting completely soaked in all of our hiking gear. Swimming back to camp in our clothes from an island was another crazy challenge. They dropped us at an island and we had to get back anyway we could…so we tried building a raft and that didn’t work, so we all swam about 500 metres in freezing water in our clothes – we did have life jackets on that they had left us though.

There were a lot of memorable things like that.