I mentioned earlier that there was some potential content coming, and lo and behold, here it is! We had friends visit last weekend, mostly to help us with a major project (which they achieved in exemplary fashion,) but also to kick around a bit, and one of the activities that I’ve been itching to do again since the first time during the Cleveland trip is to hit the canopy walk. We’d intended to have more people along, but for various reasons it didn’t work out, so it finally ended up with just my friend Wendy and I going. You undoubtedly remember Wendy and her S.O. Reg (“Strikes”) from such posts as Costa Rica or North Topsail Beach, but Reg and The Girlfriend opted to keep their feet on the ground. Nonetheless, we came prepared, and documented the outing from two different camcorders and two different smutphones, though I never did convince Wend to hold the phone horizontally when shooting video, so the format change shows in a few places.
Worse is the quality, which is only the fault of my not spending money on a Vimeo account that I upload to twice a year or so; the free account only allows a 500mb per week upload, and most of my renderings came out larger than that, so to get it down to size, the quality took a hit.
The website for Go Ape! Find a location, book your visit, marvel at how idiotic people are, whatever.
The full tour takes about three hours or so, but that includes five portions or stretches or whatever; basically, you climb a rope ladder at the beginning of each station, then travel between treestands through various obstacles and crossings until taking a zipline down to the ground, then tackling the next. You can always opt out after any of them, but what’s the fun in that? Also, the time it takes will depend on the number of people in your group, the number of people just visiting that day (backing up the treestands, as it were,) and how quickly you can tackle the tougher crossings. But yeah, have comfortable and flexible clothing and expect to get a little dirty and probably a lot sweaty. I have to say that visiting during the fall was a lot more comfortable overall.
And I rate Cleveland a little better, mostly because the ziplines were longer, but also the last station went pretty high. Which is not to say that Raleigh was a disappointment.
So, am I gonna spring for a yearly membership? Hmmmm….