Not canceling the trip was the best thing I have ever done… Long story though;
I get up to leave Friday morning, packed and on time (actually early for once). I grab some cards I wanted to mail and my travel cards (ie: tube pass, bus pass and student i.d.’s), strap on my backback and off I go. I thought I had put the travel cards in my pocket. I get to the bus stop at about 12ish and as the bus pulls up, I grab for the wallet. Only, I don’t have the wallet. I wave him on. In a sheer panic, I realize they are not on my persons at all and instantly start to back track my steps. Nope, not on the ground, not the footpath, get to my flat, not there… No… No, please tell me I didn’t – with the cards I had to mail, oh no no no – Bloody Hell! I go back to the post box and call them “Hi, slight problem, I think I have accidentally put my wallet in with the mail…” Someone will be there at 1300ish they say to empty the post box. Ok I’m thinking, the last train I can catch will be at 1345. Not bad, it’s 1245 at this point and I can wait until 1300. Yeah, not so much… The royal post collection van never comes. I realize it’s 1320 by this time and I needed to get all the way down to Paddington Station asap to catch my train so I can get the free lift to the lodge, otherwise will have to pay. I hail a taxi at 1330 with tears streaming from my eyes… talk about stress. I pay 30 quid to get there, miss the train and have to take a later one which required me to pay an additional 30 quid so I could get to the lodge. Let’s do the math: £30 + £30 = $120… Lovely. What was I just saying about the financial situation? Right… So I get to the lodge after a 6 hour train ride (train ahead of ours was broke down so we all got to sit on a train for 1 hour while it was stopped) and have dinner waiting for me. The lady that is working there just tells me, relax, try and forget about the horrendous ordeal and worry about it Monday – enjoy the weekend. Fare enough. There were 2 stag parties, another group of couples, a couple people (including me) there by themselves and a group of women. I end up meeting another American student named Ann and sat down with her. I ask her where she’s from and she says: PA. Wow, me too! Harrisburg area though. I was so tired and stressed by this point I called it an early night and wanted to go to bed. The lodge was adorable though!! Really clean, food was amazing… We get up Sat morning about 0800ish and go downstairs for breakfast. I was coasteering with a group of people in the morning session… Oh, yeah the group of people was the 2 stag parties. I was the only girl. Brilliant. We get a quick briefing of what we are to do, what we will be doing, so on. Make our way to the shed and get into our wetsuits. Ok, has anyone ever put on a wetsuit before? Well, that’s a chore and a half. So here I am struggling getting this neoprene outfit over my bikini clad body in a shed full of 15 blokes. If there was a time that I wished I was invisible it was then. Eventually I get the bloody thing on and zipped up (time = 15 mins) and we all pile into a van that takes us to the coast. We our briefed again on exactly what we will be doing and safety precautions, etc. And we get into the water. I would imagine it being pretty cold at 8°C but you can’t really feel the water in the suit. Then we swim and climb around these rocks (more like me getting smashed into them) and climb out then get back in, then climb out and get back in again. At this point I’m thinking “Can I just stay in the water and get swept around by the waves because I know that we are just going to get back in again so there’s no point to me getting out, right?” Not so much. A guy named Tim was thinking the same thing as me, so we had a laugh. I had talked to him the whole way there from the lodge on the van. He’s originally from South Africa so I was intrigued right then and there. I have a new thing for South Africa, New Zealand and Australia – I must go there!! Anyway, we finally start getting to some small jumps, yep, can’t do them. I slide on my bum into the water instead. Big Baby. Ofcourse every time I need help getting out of the water because when you put your foot on the rocks I’d either slip or not be able to hoist my fat arse up out… Sorry instructors, you thought you were going to have an easy day didn’t you. Then we get to the lagoon and the 10, 20 and 25 ft jumps. I watch all the blokes jump in one after another. Nice. I go over to the little 10ft’er and stand there for a good 10 mins. The one instructor Mark was like, I’m right here, you will be fine. I know I will be fine, I can’t do it though. I don’t want water up my nose. The other instructor Tom was like “Jamie, I am giving you 2 mins to jump or I am coming over there” Ok I think, he’s hot, he can come over here… So I yell back “Tom I accept that challenge”. The countdown begins and before you know it I hear “10, 9, 8….” And there comes Tom scaling down the rocks on the cliff running towards me. Uh-oh! “6,5,4,3….” And I’m being shoved off a cliff into the sea. And with everything that you are scared to do, you realize after you have done it that: it’s not bad. So I climb out and go back up there and jump again, get out, jump again. Great, it’s time to leave and I’m loving jumping off the little 10 ft cliff! Great feeling of accomplishment even though I needed pushed into it. Isn’t that what I said would happen? We get back to the van and need to change into our clothes from the wetsuits. Again, standing here in the middle of nowhere with 15 men trying to take off the suit and then change. Wish I was thin, wish I was thin…. I do have to say, it was quite amazing watching these guys get the suits off! I haven’t seen something this funny in a while. Everyone is stuck in them someway or another. Did I mention the little towel I brought? Nice. Try and hold that around you and change… One guy named Paul gives me a huge towel because he can see that I am struggling. We finally get changed and pile back into the van to get to the lodge for lunch. Later that afternoon, I was doing a second session of coasteering, but with a different group. The guys (as I will begin to refer to a specific group as ‘the guys’…) anyway, the guys decided to go to the pub instead of doing anything else in the afternoon. I do the second session of coasteering, this time with a waterproof camera and a lot more confidence than the first session. I am jumping off everything now – small jumps, medium jumps… 20 ft cliffs. I loved it! There was much more rock climbing and scaling along side the cliffs this session. I could feel my body becoming more tired each time I did it. It was really funny at this one place that we needed to get out of the water at; the waves would literally sweep you away from it. So every time I would make my way there, a wave would come and I’d be like “And…. I’m off again”. This was the place where we were doing the 20-30 ft jumps. I unfortunately didn’t do the 30ft, I just couldn’t. But I did the 20 ft over and over again. Hopefully there will be some pictures on the camera of this. We make our way back to the van again, after a 10 minute walk up and down hills (I was absolutely beat by this point). We get back to the lodge and shower, than wait for dinner. The guys had gotten back from the pub already were sitting there having a few drinks. The bachelor, Steve, had gotten sick earlier from the prior nights drinking events, so he was feeling a little ill. But his friends were like “No, Steve, you have to drink this…” They were hysterical. After we ate another delicious meal, the one guy Paul suggests Jenga (only he says it “Yenga”). The forfeit of the game was either run around the yard naked or buy 6 beers. This was yard Jenga too, so they were huge blocks instead of the tiny table Jenga. Anyway, we all take turns at pulling away the blocks and the one time I leave, I finally hear a burst of laughter coming from outside: Yep, Steve knocked them over. The next thing I know, I see this man running a lap outside naked. It was a cold day too. And there was a picnic table full of people just sitting there along with his mates, absolutely dying with laughter!! He was so nonchalant about it too. At this point, the other stag party presented there victim (the groom) wearing a pair of tiny red pleather shorts, black pleather tank top and a spiked dog collar! The were taking him to one of the local clubs. The guys I was talking too couldn’t get a taxi so had to stay at the lodge. We were sort of located in the middle of no where and the country of Wales isn’t exactly metropolitan, especially where we were. Anyway, as the night progressed, someone built a fire, people were playing games, etc… I met another really nice woman there named Rachel who was there with a group called SPICE. I forget what it stands for though. Her and I came back into the pool/sun room and watched the guys play pool. Alet (he’s welsh) and her friend Jem (short for Jeremy I guess) sat and talked while the game was being played in the background. They were all pretty knackered by this point so there was just a lot of laughing and, well, laughing. I had a bottle of wine and they were drinking mass quantities of welsh ale and sambuca. Alet had asked me if I wanted to go to his house with the rest of the guys in northern Wales for a roast dinner that his mum was preparing that next afternoon. I said that would be lovely, but declined because it was a stag weekend and I didn’t want to rain on their little man party. We all stayed up pretty late (5 am) and the next morning were slow to move. The guys went on a bike ride and I was to go horseback riding. So I got dressed and waited, and waited, and waited… Dave the horseback riding guy never showed up to get me. Evidently one of the horses went lame and he was too busy attending to that to have his wife or someone call down to the lodge to let us know. Lovely. That means that I get to sit around for 3 hours doing nothing while everyone else is hiking or coasteering or sea kayaking. Wasn’t so bad though because of the headache I had and lack of sleep. The guys come back from biking and Alet says to me “You are coming right?” I declined again politely and then Tim says “Hey, why are you eating, Alet’s mum is cooking – you’re coming right?” “Well, I wasn’t… I didn’t want to…” He was like “Plans have already been arranged – you’re coming”. Ok then, I am going to a strangers house for a wonderful home cooked meal with 6 of my new stag friends! Alet and Steve are cousins so it was Steve’s aunt (Alet’s mum) who made the meal. Such nice people. It amazes me every time I travel that I meet the kindest, most thoughtful people and it makes you realize that not everyone is bad, there is a lot of good in the world. I felt such at home with the guys, joking, getting picked on, etc. Really funny story: Steve and Alet's nana is 90 and is suffering from dementia. She doesn't know about Steve's wedding and we had all been told over and over again not to mention the wedding. Knowing this from hearing them say it over and over again, I would have thought it was pretty cut and dry. What does the one guy say in the middle of the meal? "So (to Alet's mum) are your driving to the wedding or...?" It was hysterical! Everyone starts talking like he wasn't even talking, tears are streaming down everyones face from laughing so hard! After the wonderful dinner and delicious dessert (never had home cooked custard before) we got back into the car for the 5 hour ride back. I rode with Paul, Steve and Tim. The two pink shirted guys (I’m so sorry that their names are escaping me at this moment) took off in another car and Alet stayed there, because, well he lived there (makes sense right?). It was a long ride in the car back to England. The train station they took me too was a 30 min ride back to the London Waterloo station. If I would have taken the train back from the lodge in Wales, I wouldn’t have gotten home until 2300. Thanks to these guys, I got home at 2100. At lease some things went well after the horrible day Friday!! I finally get home and a girl that I live with named Jenna says to me “Hey, have you been to your room?” I was like “No, why?” and she says “I found something of yours….” “MY TRAVEL CARDS????” She was like “Yeah, just found them 2 hours ago on the footpath outside, hope you didn’t lose them for long, are you just now leaving to go somewhere?” I screamed “Jenna, I love you! I have been missing them since Friday morning!!”
So with that in mind, anything bad or went wrong over the weekend was instantly dismissed! After conquering a fear like jumping off a cliff into the water, meeting such nice people that I will never forget and having one of the best weekends thus far on my trip – I can honestly say I’d never been happier!! Or sorer (bruises up and down my legs)
