The Warren Center

For anyone that doesn't know, it was well below 50 degrees this morning. i woke up at 7:00 AM to get ready to go to the Warren Center in Ashland. it's owned by Northeastern and it was a pretty cool place. There were different ropes courses in the woods that we used for some team building within the Criminal Justice major. Of course, it was sub 50 this morning, and my bus didnt have working heat. I managed to get some sleep on the way up, but needless to say, I was a bit stiff when we arrived. After a quick breakfast we were ready to begin.

We started with some basic ice breakers and then split off into 2 groups. We played some silly games to warm up and then were off. My groups first challenge was to get the entire team to scale a 14 ft. wall, without using anything but our own bodies and of course, once over, you couldnt come back to lift. Well, we were lucky enough to have a few very big kids that got most of us over then somehow managed to lift themselves over. We finished with the last kid jumping up and using another kid who was hanging off the side to pull himself up. we averaged slightly over 3 people a minute, which apparently was very impressive.

We then moved on to a low ropes course where we were split up and had to travel across wires in an attempt to score points. Well once we figured out a system for each one, we flew through and managed a much higher score than the previous team. We then found out our average time on the wall was slightly better than the other team's and it was starting to warm up so we went off for lunch feeling pretty good.

Next came the hard stuff. After lunch we had the high ropes course, which, as you might guess, involved high ropes and lots of harnesses. Me and a few of my friends decided to go for the hardest one, the Giants ladder, mostly cuz that group had the least amount of volunteers. The Giants ladder consisted of four 4 inch thick logs roped together that three people had to climb up and then stand on the top using only a single rope to balance (we had harnesses though). Me and my friends Call and Will managed the best time of the day on it. We don't know how. Some of the other groups were clearly more athletic, strong, taller, and in some cases more experienced with that sorta thing (ROTC kids). We though still dominated. 3 minutes flat, 12 seconds faster than the next best. It was fun knowing that 3 completely average kids (and short in Calls case) we able to pull through like that with simple team work (and my prodigious skills of course). We beat the three ROTC kids by about a minute and a half.

We came back after and I simply crashed. I stayed in bed and played videogames for a few hours. I had no more energy (the earliest I had woken up this year before that was 9 O'clock, and on a weekend it was 11 O'clock).

Even with what felt like a lack of sleep, though I had 7 hours of sleep(almost 8 counting the bus ride), it turned out to be a great, if a bit chilly, day.