She Flies Through the Air With the Greatest of Ease

I did it. This one made me nervous, so much so that as I was driving up in the rain, I began to secretly hope that it would be rained out. But, as with most things I have been nervous about doing during the last year, it ended up being a lot of fun and I'm glad I got to do it. List item number 2, Treego was completed on an overcast day with an excellent Treego partner.

 
My sister, as many of you may know, lives in Calgary with her boyfriend. They planned on coming to NB for a visit in late June, and when I mentioned Treego to them, my sister's boyfriend said he would go with me. So the two of us drove an hour in the rain on his first full day in NB to have our adventure. He was a great partner in crime, encouraging me, making sure I was ok and cheering me on when I finished a platform I had trouble with. Hooray for friends!

One of the reasons that I wanted to try Treego was to recapture some of the excitement I used to get climbing trees as a child. As a slightly older child that is, because I was a big scaredy cat when I was young, once very memorably (and extremely gracefully) getting stuck hanging upside down on the very first branch, screaming for help until my sister went to get my mom. High point in my life. But as I got older I got more confident I really started to enjoy climbing trees. But good climbing trees are getting harder and harder to come by, so Treego seemed like a good option. 




The Treego course I chose was made up of 75 platforms which were supposed to take about 5 minutes each. Our appointment was for 2:30, but when we got there they were still working on organizing the extremely large 2:00 group. So we started pretty late. We didn't get out gear on and head to the course until about 3:15 and we didn't start the actual obstacles until around 3:45. Then we had to wait for each of the 50 odd people ahead of us to go. You're only allowed to have one person on a ladder at at time, 2 on an obstacle and 3 on a platform. Plus there are always going to be obstacles that some people find harder and therefore, take more time for them to complete. Which leads to a lot of waiting for the people behind. We finished at 7pm and then had to drive back to Grand Bay for the delicious lobster supper that was awaiting us. I think we ate around 9. Looooong day.

There are 4 different courses of increasing difficulty; blue, green, red and black. I admit that after finishing the red course, I seriously considered climbing down out of the trees and not completing the black course. Luckily, the people in front of us had done it before and they assured me that the black course wasn't as hard as the red. I definitely agree with them, and I'm definitely glad I stuck it out.

So, there won't be any pictures of me doing the actual course, because I have really sweaty hands when I'm nervous or physically exerting myself, and since I really didn't want to drop my phone out of a 2 story tree, I left it in the car. But here are some pictures of other people doing the same course!

The ziplines were a lot of fun, especially since I expected to be terrified by them. One great thing about Treego is that you hook up your own safety equipment, which made me feel really secure. I did have one wicked bounce-back on the first big zipline I did, but I recovered pretty quickly.

No, that is not me athletically swinging like Tarzan into that net. I opted to take the alternate route here. See those wired with the vertical logs on them? I took that path. Much easier.

This was the only obstacle that I really fell on, and it was mostly a give-up kind of fall. I decided to just fall back and hang from my harness for a minute (which was super uncomfortable, by the way), intending to just pull myself across like on a zipline, but once I hung there and looked at it I realized that it was actually easier to regain my balance and stand up. It worked and I completed the obstacle.

This one was, to me, the most challenging of all the obstacles. It's kind of hard to see, but there are three logs hung end to end by a rope on either end. They swing like crazy and it's really hard to stretch and reach the next one. You can do some wicked splits. As I was leaning back to sit and hang like before I realized it would be easier to stick my leg out at that angle and grab the next log. As tired as I was, I knew it was one of the last things I'd have to do and I went for it. And I made it.

And that was my Treego experience. It was a blast and I didn't even end up with too many injuries. Mostly just muscle soreness, a bruise on my inner thigh from the harness and some pretty sore hands. I think I was much better off than the two girls ahead of us who's short shorts were shorter than their harnesses. I'm sure they experienced some definite chaffing the next day. Once again, I'm really glad I stuck to it and didn't give up. It's another thing that I wasn't sure I'd be able to do, but am so glad I did. I felt like a champ.