Happy Birthday Christopher!

Today, Jamie and myself were woken up to Primary 7’s angelic singing, “Happy Birthday dear Christopher…” which is certainly a new 7:00am alarm call for me!
We’ve had a mixed bag of weather today, heavy rain in the morning and gorgeous sunshine in the afternoon. However, spirits were high and the children had yet another fun filled day.

Group One
We headed down to breakfast at 8:30am this morning. We had cereal and cooked breakfast. Afterwards, at 9:00am we went into the field studies room and spoke about our morning activity. Our first activity was climbing and abseiling. We did this in the indoor climbing walls because it was so wet and windy outside. We had lunch at 1:00pm – soup and sarnies. Afterwards, we met again in the field studies room and spoke about the gorge walk. We left the centre about 2:00pm and travelled a couple of miles in the mini-bus. We set off through a grave-yard and had a look at some famous names on headstones (happy topic) then got to the bottom of the gorge. We climbed up the gorge, in the water, out the water, under the water, on slabs, rock faces, through rocks and up ropes! Half way up we got to slide down part of a water-fall (Miss McNicoll as well!) and slightly further on got to the part of the gorge known as the ‘key-hole’. We had to climb through a gap in the rocks with water lashing onto our heads and faces. Then we had to slide ourselves carefully between to slab faces. We got to the top of the gorge and walked back down through lots of mud!

Group Two
This morning, we met in the common room to discuss our morning activity. We were told that we were going to do gorge walking first and rock climbing in the afternoon. We got dressed in warm clothes and put our water-proofs on top. We went out to the mini-bus and were taken to a forest. We walked through a graveyard and went down some steps. The steps led us to the start of the gorge. As we went on, there was lots of water splashing down on us- there has been a lot of rainfall over here! We climbed through the water and on rocks. We got to slide down the waterfall and climb through a gap in the rocks with water splahing our faces. We crossed over the gorge and climbed back down through the forest.
This afternoon we went rock climbing. We started off inside and played some rock-climbing games. We also did some climbs and abseils. When we went outside we walked to a huge cliff face and climbed up to the top and then abseiled back down.

There was a huge surprise at tea and cake this afternoon, when the Benmore staff produced an amazing chocolate cake for Christopher’s Birthday. This time our singing multiplied as we were helped by Corn Bank, a group of Primary 6 pupils from Penicuik.

Tonight’s dinner menu consisted of Fish and chips followed by jelly and ice-cream, full tummies and lots of energy for biking and forest walking tomorrow.

Group One will feature in tomorrow’s blog- having problems with one of our cameras, sorry.