WALES

My first trip out of England was to an adventure lodge in Pembrokeshire, Wales called Preseli Venture. The weekend broke into my Top 5 weekends of all time- look out Disneyworld! Starting off a little rough with a cancelled coach, we made it to Preseli to find hot tea, lasagna, and apple pie waiting for us. Heaven. We all relaxed that night by the fire. Wake up was 8a.m. Saturday morning and our first event was coasteering. I was placed in a small group with Linley, Ryan S, Ryan W, and Kinsley.

Coasteering means climbing up cliffs, jumping off them into water, and then swimming around to find the next cliff. We changed into wetsuits, extra wet suit shirts, shorts, socks, gloves, helmets and life vests. Fyi, putting on a wet suit is much more difficult than it sounds! Our two guides drove us to the coast and taught us the proper jumping technique while helping us climb around. We all floated around in this area called the ‘Toilet.’ The tide caused the water to rise and fall in this little cavity, creating a toilet bowl feeling- fun. We started out with little jumps, belly flopping and flipping until we learned the proper technique of jumping in feet first while looking at the sky. After about two hours of climbing and jumping, we hiked to this bluff featuring our two biggest jumps yet- about 35 and 40 feet. The second to last one, the wind picked up and flung my legs out causing me to land on my rear instead of my feet. Over a week has gone by, and my ass still hurts…

The feeling of jumping off those cliffs was extremely addicting. Words cannot accurately describe the anti-gravity, can’t breathe, can’t scream, borderline panic feeling of catapulting into the water. Oh, and the water was 42 F.

After struggling out of our wetsuits, we rode back to the lodge rocking out to the Venga Boys and Beyonce and drinking the most amazing hot chocolate known to man. Hot soup, cheese and bread was for lunch and then it was time to face the cold again. Getting into a wet suit the second time was- I’d like to say easier but- even more spastic than the first time.

Once reaching the beach, we had a short lesson by Bramble and Paul about how to surf and then hit the water: the really, really cold water that rocked my board and I several times. I stood up a few times, but mostly did knee surfing because I couldn’t haul my padded wet suit self up on the board to balance on my feet. Paul had to grab me out of the water a few times and guppy-swimming-lesson help me to a wave.

At the end of the day, exhaustion consumed us around 10p.m. Exhaustion or several more hot chocolates and Bailey’s finally won over consciousness. The next morning was a hike along the Welsh coastline, where most of these pictures are from. We went around the most western point on the whole island, St. David’s. The scenery is gorgeous beyond gorgeous. That was the last event of our adventure weekend- what a blast!