Mood:  happy

                Hello from Italy people!  This is Sabrina, and yes I have finally made it to Italy.  Today, I get to write about our exploits over the past… yesterday.  Wow, that was all in one day.  We did a lot! 

                Okay, so about a month ago Mom signed us up to go on a trip to a ropes course.  This was supposed to take place while Dad was still out of town.  Anyway, this trip ended up being cancelled because not enough people signed up.  Apparently, not a lot of mothers felt like climbing through the trees on Mother’s Day.  We can’t explain it either.  Mom and I were bummed about it because the trip sounded like a lot of fun.  So when Dad got back and started talking about how we should do something on Memorial Day weekend Mom had a plan. 

                Yesterday we left the house around eleven o’clock to drive to one of these ropes courses.  The one that Mom in her infinite wisdom had selected happened to be called Acropark.  I really had no idea what to expect because I knew nothing about this particular ropes course.  We all piled into the Jeep while Jacoby muttered about how we were destroying his social life.  As his sister, I am entitled to find this funny.  

The drive to the Acropark deserves its own paragraph.  The first part was comparatively boring.  We drove past a lot of houses and stores.  Some of those houses were more interesting than others because they had an older European look to them.  While I am capable of appreciating the architecture of a single building I have never really found towns a fascinating study.  Things changed when we reached the mountains.  Mountains always impress me, sheer, vertical walls of green.  It’s difficult to explain.  There are so many places in Italy where it almost feels like you are in a bowl because of mountain chains so high the tops blur into a blue haze.  Dad had a lot of fun with the actual drive.  The road up the mountains had an insane number of switch backs.  These were made even more insane by the fact that motorcycles and bicycles were apparently partial to this road. Motorcyclists screamed past the cars with their knees practically scraping the ground on turns.  Whereas the bicyclists took up half of the lane forcing cars in both directions to make do with three fourths of a tiny unlined road.  Boring it was not.

We ate lunch at a small restaurant on the side of the mountain.  After managing to communicate to the proprietor that we wanted ham and cheese sandwiches we sat outside and ate them.  There wasn’t much of a view from the restaurant because it faced the road rather than the valley.  Shortly thereafter we resumed our drive.  The view on the mountains was spectacular.  There were, I’m not joking, rolling planes of wildflowers spotted with the occasional house.  It was a lot cooler in the mountains as well.  I’ll spare you more praise of the mountains and say that eventually we made it to the Acropark.  It was situated at the edge of a forest next to a huge German style building containing a restaurant and bar.  There was also a small body of water nearby that created a nice breeze.  So we get out of the car and walk around.  The sign on the ticket booth says that it will be twenty minutes until the next safety lecture which is mandatory.  So we walk into the forested area and look at these courses. 

There were four courses at this particular Acropark.  There was a green course for little kids which was only a couple of feet off of the ground.  Then, there was a blue course that was a little more challenging for slightly older kids.  Next, there was the red course which was slightly more challenging.  This was the course that we planned to do because the final course was the black course.  In order to do the black course you had to be older than eighteen and sign a waiver stating that if you managed to harm yourself it was your own fault.  Jacoby couldn’t do that one and Mom and I weren’t sure we were ready for it.

After twenty minutes had passed we walked back to the ticket stand and waited…  And there was no one there.  Now we are thinking, “Huh… that’s not good.”  We couldn’t tell if they were closed or what was going on.  With no one there to ask, we walked over to the bar, which was more like a café, and tried to ask the guy working there.  With some multilingual phrases we managed to find out that the Acropark would open at three.  We got some gelato at the bar and then we decided to drive to Asiago to search for a park that Mom and Dad had heard about.  Dad says he has written about Asiago before so I won’t say much about that.  For those of you like myself who missed that post I’ll just sum it up with: cute cheese town in the mountains.  It only took twelve minutes to drive there, but they never ended up finding the park.  Either that or they found the park but it wasn’t what they expected…  I was there, but I can’t catch everything.

We drove back to Acropark and sat about for a bit allowing Jacoby to catch up on some valuable Game Boy Advanced time.  Finally the Acropark opened for business.  We were each handed helmets and a harness.  Helmets, not a problem, the harnesses took a little figuring out.  With a few exclamations of “Alora” from the Italian course workers we all managed to get suited up.  After a quick demo we were allowed to start the course.  It was a blast!  I can’t say how high up we were because I am no good at judging distances.  All I know is that, had we fallen, we would have broken limbs.  We went across rope bridges and walked along cables; we climbed ladders and hopped from stump to stump.  We also had to traverse a series of logs suspended lengthwise by cables.  The most fun, of course, were the zip lines that connected all of these treetop obstacles.  It was pretty awesome, and had the course gone on any longer I don’t think any of us would have been disappointed. 

We finished, laughing and joking, and were getting ready to turn in our harnesses when one of the course workers told us that we hadn’t done the big zip line yet.  We all kind of looked at each other, because you were supposed to pay extra for the big zip line, but the guy told us to go ahead so we went.  This zip line had two legs.  You took off from what amounted to a dirt slope.  This was fairly ungraceful as almost everyone ended up dragging their butt along the ground before taking off.  From there the zip line led to a platform on the edge of the parking lot, and the next zip line took you across the parking lot and the water to a platform on the other side of the water.  While definitely fun it was not nearly as satisfying as doing a whole course. 

Although the rabbit project was a success our plan to see Angels and Demons was less so.  We discovered on the way to the theater that the movie was at six o’clock rather than nine as we had anticipated.  So, we settled for Chinese food in a restaurant that has a huge aquarium in the floor.  Then, we got home in just enough time for Jacoby to get in some desperate computer time before bedtime.  Fortunately, Angles and Demons is playing again today so we are going to do that shortly.

Posted by kisajaja at 4:37 PM MEST

Updated: Sunday, 24 May 2009 4:44 PM MEST

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