by Laura Schnell

 

 

June 1, 2007: My favorite day was team building at Castlewellan Forest Park.  This park is 460 hectares of woodlands, lakes, and attractions.  First, we had to make our way through the Peace Maze in our assigned groups.  If you make every possible wrong turn through the maze, you will have walked 3.5 kms.  As my team did come in last, I'm pretty sure we accomplished the 3.5 kms of walking that morning. 

 

After we all finally got to the top, and rang the peace bell, we moved on to contests.  Hula-hoops, jump ropes, and balls were all involved in our team building.  We worked to together to try to win every race we could.  Funny how it worked out; for each team won one contest! After our race, they brought about another competition.  This was a bit more challenging as we had to find five poles with codes on them through this 460 hectares park with a map.  You would think since we had a map, it would all be easy.  However, we had a lot of trouble figuring out the map.  We had an hour to accomplish this task.  My group didn't figure out where we should be until we had only ten minutes left.  We lost..!  

 

For lunch, we ate in the Annesley Garden.  It was so beautiful.  They brought flowers, bushes, and trees from all over the world and planted them in this garden.  It was a prime picture taking time!  Atlas, we went caneoing.  Of course this brought another adventure.  As the water is a little bit chilly in Ireland, we had to put on wetsuits, and boy was that a task.  When we finished taking pictures of our funny outfits with our funny shoes, we were ready to stand on our canoes with our paddles in the air to get down the lake the lazy American way.  We made it to one of the islands and played hide and go seek, and of few other fun games that made us feel ever to young again.  Of course hide and seek didn't last to long as we were in blue wetsuits.  After our fun and games were over, we made up for the easy ride down the lake.  It was quite the challenge and could definitely feel it the next day.  To finish up this awesome experience at Castlewellan, we jumped in the lake to splash around a little.