Student blogs

One of the highlights of societies so far was the kayaking freshers trip to Wales. We stayed in the Imperial Mountain Hut somewhere in Snowdonia.

Standard start with superhero-resembling poses atop a minibus, because there is no mundane way to get 12 kayaks on a rack. I don’t know how to describe a long bus journey, other than with the confession that I now know what the worst radio stations of London sound like.

The hut is cool. It’s a hut and it’s cold, so it’s cool. The evening consisted of the intellectually fulfilling creation of architecture on the ceiling beams using the many cans of *hot chocolate* we emptied. The human to human-sleeping-space ratio may have seemed questionable, but no deaths occurred (to my knowledge), so it couldn’t have been too bad. Or we were all too *chocolatey warm* to care.

I woke up to people following the smell of food like zombies, so thought I’d join their ranks. We packed ourselves and drove to a good bank of The Conwy. There was totally not a man who shouted at the president and we definitely didn’t ignore him and get on in the wrong place anyway. Why would we be such beasts?

If that river was a person, it would be the kind that throws rocks at you, whips you with twigs and then laughs. I think I acquired the main message of the day, which was to love the rocks and shun the trees, which seemed counterintuitive until you did it wrong and realised why. The most memorable section was one that most groups didn’t run, since no one really knew what it entailed. Luckily for our group, someone highly experiences checked it out for us and emerged alive, so we thought it would be fine. At take out, our group and Team Redbeard were the only ones not to run the second half, which was apparently harder, but I really wouldn’t know. This mildly sucked, since we were only late because we had to wait for out leader to do the shuttle. (No, I’m not complaining (yes, I am (a little)))

By the time we had all gotten changed and were hurling boats around, the darkness had encompassed us and we may have dropped a boat off the top of the minibus and almost hit someone. No comment. The evening was a blur of chilli, cheese and *hot chocolate*. Being students of such a wondrous university, we once again needed to fulfil our intellectual needs and achieved a state of mental bliss by climbing a ladder.

I feel that a morning mission of some kind may have occurred the next morning, but I was busy being unconscious wedged between two people, whose identities are not entirely clear to me. The packing was naturally *incredibly* organised and we were all ready in *minutes*.

The Dee was honestly brilliant, at least to a wee little fresher like yours truly. There were two features which I found awesome, probably because of lack of experience, but also because they were DAMN FUN. So I ran them both twice. The first time down Serpent’s tail, someone’s boat got wedged into a rock, so I got the joy of waiting in an eddy. The second time down Town Falls, I ended up stuck and spinning on ‘the rock’, as in ‘see that rock? Do not go near it’ and mysteriously ended up slightly upside down. Having initially failed miserably to roll or at least breathe in while my face had the chance, I emerged producing a prolonged Scottish grunt and gleaming with the sparkly joy of not dying.

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