Rock climbing

 Miya's 10th birthday was a month and a half ago.

She'd decided she wanted to go rock climbing, but Covid happened and we had to postpone.

Finally, yesterday, with the Covid Alert Level back down to 1, and the school kids back at school, the family spent a couple of hours at Northern Rocks, a bouldering centre just five minutes drive from us.

It was brilliant, and we all had an awesome time.

What's great about these bouldering walls, rather than the old-style climbing walls, is that we don't need to rope up with belays and so on.  The set climbs, all colour-coded for different levels of difficulty, are never too high to need ropes.

Predictably, the girls got into it very quickly, even though they'd only been rock climbing once before in their lives.  Mama was not too bad, either, and did most of the orange climbs (the easiest level).

Northern Rocks has a special on at the moment, that first-timers can come back at no cost for the next week to climb as often as they want.

We took advantage of that, and the girls and I went back again today for another hour (just paying for shoe hire).  The three of us are all working on purple climbs (third easiest level, after orange and blue), with me mostly getting them and the girls sometimes getting them.

We took our camera this time:

The biggest challenge for all of us right now is that our hands are a bit sore, with blisters and worn fingertips.  But we'll quickly recover.

Miya is keen to continue with climbing, and we're now looking into getting a membership there.  The thought is that we stop our YMCA gym family membership and instead get a membership at Northern Rocks.  We're also looking into Miya joining a class there from term 1 next year (too busy this year!) -- we hear that if Miya progresses past purple level and starts on green then she should be good to attend the more advanced Thursday class.