My TY Diary - Gaisce Hike

Week 36

It was a very exciting week this week as we had our Gaisce Hike. Gaisce is a program that TY's across Ireland can take part in. It involves taking three activities: a physical activity, a recreational activity and a community service and doing them for an hour a week for 13 weeks. The final part of the program is doing a 25 km hike. This year, we went to Kippure in the Wicklow Mountains. We went off in a bus at 2 pm on Friday afternoon and arrived at the lodges at around 3 pm. We packed our stuff and chose our beds and then set off at 3:30. It was a lovely afternoon and we walked 15 km over 3 mountains. When we arrived back at 9 pm, we were dead. We had been walking for 5 hours and our feet were killing us. We then cooked dinner. We already had a pasta dish made thanks to Eve :). We also made 3 pizzas. Two of them were burned at the bottom and uncooked at the top so we were left with one. Our chips also didn't do very well with the outside burned and the inside raw. We ate the food in minutes. We then sat down and watched TV with another house who came into our house and then we all fell fast  asleep. We got up at 7:30 the next morning and had our breakfast. We made our lunches and tidied up the house a bit and got our bags ready for the next day. We then went our to the adventure center. We were split up into groups and did different activities. My group started off with the Leap Of Faith. It is when you stand up in this really tall pillar and them jump off onto the hanging bar. It was terrifying standing on the top but then it was great fun when you got down and I felt like I had achieved something. We then went over to the rock climbing wall and the the vertical challenge. It is like a vertical obstacle course between two trees. It was really hard to do but we reached the top and got a big clap. It started to get really cold all of a sudden while we were doing the abseiling. We went inside and ate something before wrappig up in ay extra clothes that we had and heading out. A van brought us to our starting point and the second we stood out of the van it started to snow. It was freezing and we had to do a 10km hike. Everybody was really grumpy and cold and all we wanted was to go and sit down with a cup of tea and a biscuit. After 4 painful hours, we made it to the bottom and everybody ran inside looking for warmth. We were so wet from the snow, that we may as well had been swimming in all of our clothes. We all got into and dry clothes we had  left, which was (pyjamas for most of us) and headed home. We were all freezing and tired and wet. When we got home I fell asleep for the rest of the day.
Although there was a lot of moaning on the hike, I enjoyed the trip overall. It was a fun experience and I would do it again! (maybe without the walking this time:). )