The Wonderful Outdoors

From tree to swinging tree.

Last weekend some friends and I went to Adventureland just outside Athens.  It's a big expanse of a park, completely natural, in which the park developers designed various activities such as swinging through trees, climbing nets and zipping down loads of zip-line thingies (so much fun!)  There were three levels of difficulty to get through: Foxes, Wolves and Eagles.  We did all three...

I can't tell you how wonderful it was to spend all of that time in the outdoors; being in nature and taking on such physically, mentally and emotionally challenging obstacles.  Physically because a lot of it was darn difficult:  lots of climbing up steep wooden ladders and hanging off of ropes. My muscles just couldn't take it after a while.  Mentally because we were at such heights! And emotionally because we were terribly hungry all throughout the day and the darn place didn't serve any food. (Other than soft-serve ice cream which we had to wait 45mins for - and even then it was milk in a cone).  Needless, to say we were all tired and ever so slightly cranky by the end of it.

But no one was in a bad mood, that's for sure.  We had a fantastic time.  Maybe it was the clean air, maybe it was the proximity to the trees but something about it was truly cathartic.

That said, I urge you all to try something similar to this.  Or at the very least spend some time outdoors as regularly as possible.

It's good for the soul.

P.S. - It looks like I was all on my own, but I promise there was a whole bunch of us there!  All pictures were taken by my good friend George.

*****