Now that I’m old enough, I’m a Guide! Sometimes, at Guides, they have trips to places. For one of our trips, we went to the XC Centre, where we did caving and climbing. We did an hour of each, our group doing climbing and then swapping to do caving. I think that they were both even in rating, eight of ten on each.
We did climbing first. We did a sort of warm-up in our helmets on the little wall, and then we put on our harnesses and began to climb the bigger ones. On some of them, someone behind you had to pull a rope as you climbed up, and if they forgot to pull it, you had to shout, “Tighten up!” or you wouldn’t be able to climb any further. However, on the rest of them there was a sort of circle thingy at the top which pulled you up as you climbed up, and lowered you as you abseiled back down; those ones, I found, were much easier than the others, partly because the person pulling my rope kept forgetting to! Tilly’s friend Eleanor climbed right to the top of the very highest one, which is cave-textured and some places are slanted so you have to climb sideways or even upside down if you take the wrong direction!
Then we did caving. There were some fire-exit-y-type things if you didn’t like it or were lost and had to get out. It was pitch black in the caves (which were made of plastic, as I’ll explain later), so you had a little torch on your helmet that you could make bright, dim, or just turn it off (you wouldn’t be able to see then, though). The caves weren’t made of real rock – they were made of plastic, yet they were just as poky! Sometimes there were ridges above your helmet that you had to duck under, and there were also gaps as small as quarter of a metre from the ground to the ceiling (I’m not joking). Tilly and I first went into a ‘six’ with Eleanor and Hannah, Rebecca and also Louise, but after that Tilly and I went with Louise, and the other three went together. We were trying to get away from them, and they were trying to catch us!
There were lots of drops and tunnels. Most of the time you had to walrus along on your front, keeping your helmet down in case you bash it on the roof! Because some times you were walrus-ing along, and there was a five-foot drop (which there actually was in the caves, the instructor told us, but we never came across it), you would have to slide your hands off the floor onto the lower floor, in a handstand, and then let go and crash land, and hope for the best. However, because my legs are shorter and my arms are shorter and my whole body, in fact, is shorter, only Tilly and Louise had to do that, for I could swivel my legs round and slide down into the whole feet first. A lot more civilised!
We drove Eleanor and a girl called Jasmine there and back. On the way home, for most of the time it was past half nine, and as soon as we got home Tilly and I retired to our bedrooms, me creeping round William (who was asleep) before settling down to sleep.