Oliver's Blog

Yesterday a select few of us elite athletes decided to go and visit a tree-top adventure course, very similar to Go Ape in Margam Park with a few significant differences. The main difference is that this one was designed by someone who was very drunk on calvados at the time by the looks of it.

I managed to carry my camera around the entire course and have a few photos which I took on the ‘blue’ and ‘green’ difficulty courses. By the time I got to ‘red’ I had to hold on and concentrate a lot more, and once I got to ‘black’ I’d forgotten who I was.

All started off well, a unusual down-hill section was a bit tricky as shown in the photo above, but the first two sections were no worse than Go Ape. Oh yes, apart from the amusing Snowboard section on which I got stranded due to my pulley catching on the return guide rope – I was standing between two trees around 50 metres apart, right in the middle, on a snowboard suspended on two wires. Josh attempted to pull me back but didn’t have the weight to manage it so a Spiderman-like course attendant helped instead. Once we hit the red course, Diarra’s Tarzan calls started to sound more like a 14 year old girl at a Take That concert and for good reason – pain… the course didn’t just get higher, it got increasingly more physically strenuous so once off the red course I jumped straight in to the black one without stopping to think… just in case.

The black course started off with a rope ladder…… on an under-hang. Once you made it to the uneven ledge at the top of that, you had to negotiate several braces hanging from ropes, each on too far to easily reach. Next was a 15ft climbing wall to a bridge. The bridge itself had to be traversed on a bike which if you didn’t pedal, wouldn’t make it all the way. You try riding a bike on a bridge two-feet wide and fifty-feet up. Next up were more braces on ropes, only a little easier this time as you could do a left-foot, right-foot approach. Now came the interesting part. I say interesting, I mean bl**dy difficult part. Seven logs hanging horizontally by a rope attached in the centre – the idea is to use upper body strength to grab the ropes and jump from log to log. Sounds simple, easier to cheat and just hang in your harness and pull yourself along. The course supervisor advised us that the record for that section is 6 seconds – funnily enough he happened to hold that very record. Most people crossed it in about 5 minutes apart from Mat who took 25 minutes whilst he ‘rested his muscles’ and let a few people go across in front of him.

To get down from the black course you attached yourself to another rope, and the course supervisor gently lowered you down, as demonstrated by Diarra in this video:

We’re back! (sort of). We’re back at the gites anyway, recovering from our manic few days at Disneyland Paris. We stayed at hotel Cheyenne this time, a nice cowboy themed hotel which was much better than Hotel Santa Slum where we have previously stayed.

Disney standards however were not up to their usual high standards unfortunately… The rooms are in need of renovation with peeling wallpaper, televisions that don’t really get a signal even on the internal information channels, dodgy electrics which make fizzy sounds, and flickering lights – perhaps that’s all part of the American Western theme?? They also forgot to put any towels in our room on the last day… tut tut. The rest of the trip was very memorable though. We started off well going straight to Pirates of the Caribbean. It was a bit dark, but Poppy enjoyed herself:

There were of course two slightly adjoined families taking part in this trip, the Shinglers and the Hewitts/Nguyens. Myself and Thai decided to leave behind the under-height ones and their baby sitters to test out a couple of the more interesting rides in the park. Starting with Space Mountain, we queued for about 20 minutes before wondering why the ride was quiet…. yup, it had broken down. The next day we tried our luck with with Big Thunder Mountain and that broke down after about a 30 minute wait. Hmm, our fortunes did pick up as we managed a ride on Rock’n’Roller Coaster and Space Mountain eventually. Anyhows I’m blaming Thai for them breaking down – I’m convinced he had a word with the park management as he was a bit nervous .

Back to the kids and Poppy enjoyed herself lots, taking her autograph book and shoving it in the face of every character she could find.

Or even just shoving her face in chocolate mousse.

We managed to see lots of performances and shows including the night-time parade, a Playhouse Disney live show, and best of all, a ‘Welcome Princess Frog-Snogger’ parade as viewed from the windows of Walt’s American Diner on Main Street. Our table had prime viewing over Main Street as the parade passed below us, and despite young madam’s protests that she wanted to be down on the road watching it, she liked watching it from that vantage point really.

And speaking of that meal out, it was well posh innit. I had a burger (more on burgerage later) topped with peppers and foie gras. Now…. I’d never had that before so thought I’d give it a go. I’ve given it a go and I’ll cross it off the list. My best description is to liken it to eating a slice of tenderised slug. The burger and lattice fries were amazing though as was the chocolate cake and brownie ice cream I had for dessert. Sadly the chef wouldn’t cook the pigeon who was sat on a nest outside the window. Shame, it was quite plump.

Shooting Wobots, or “Buzz Lightyear’s Laser Blast” as it is correctly known was the holiday’s most popular ride for all concerned I believe with babies Joseph and Tyson becoming obsessed with Buzz. I managed a decent score of around 139000 when sitting with Poppy, however with Joseph controlling the direction lever my score plummeted to just over the 100000 mark. Poppy’s high score was just over 3000 – a definite improvement over the last trip to Disney. Joseph’s other highlights included It’s a flippin’ monotonous small world, and the Dumbo ride (on which I thought I saw the mother-in-law but it turned out to be a false alarm).

And finally, I give you the saddest news of all. You may remember my fascination with the culinary genius that was The Pizzaburger. Well, some eejit at Disney has decided that they no longer need to sell such a product and have converted the perfectly perfect Buzz Lightyear’s Pizza Planet restaurant in to an all you can eat pizza, pasta and salad buffet. R.I.P. The Pizzaburger:

I made up for that disappointment by eating five none-pizza’d burgers in two days. With chips. And Ice creams, and an all-you-can-eat buffet at the Lucky Nugget Saloon. And Chicken Tikka strips with rice at the Hakkuna Matata Restaurant. And a few hundred complimentary breakfast pain-au-chocolat. With Nutella. Oh, and there was the extra few chocolate brownies I sneaked out of the Lucky Nugget wrapped in napkins and placed carefully in the pushchair. And the coconut chicken I had on the first night too. Mmmm, that was in the Blue Lagoon restaurant next to Pirates of the Caribbean. Can anyone work out how far I need to run to burn that lot off?

Thanks to Ken of Ken’s Quiz Site and Robbins Ramblings (and of course father-in-law) fame, today’s energy drink was entitled “I Have No Limits”. It had a very nice flavour that was quite sweet – not far off Red Bull. Due to the odd comment about lack of Frenchness regarding my blog, I’ve taken the photo of the can with a backdrop of a 17th Century Norman farmhouse… the out-of-focus can was intentional, honest (I shall get used to Manual mode on the camera one day).

Tomorrow we are off to Disney, whoop!

…do as I always do and find an authentic local Restaurant. This one was of a Scottish theme named “McDonalds”. Poppy had Les Nuggets de Poullet avec des Frites with a glass of Jus d’Orange. I opted for a CBO avec des Frites. Poppy enjoyed herself:

After the meal, I took Poppy to the supermarket for supplies. It was at this point that my childish sense of humour unfortunately got the better of me and I had to suppress sniggers by taking photos. I wasn’t aware you could actually purchase a Gaylord Mincer.

And if you get bored of mincing, you can always pop one of these pills:

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