Outdoor Centre pt II
A particularly traumatic period of my life which until now had receeded into the deepest, darkest part of my memory has unfortunately been brought to the surface by Chickenwire's submission...

Every two years my school would send us off for a couple of nights at the Waterknott ODC for a sesh of "team-building" exercises in some god-forsaken dale(read: series of utterly demoralising forced hikes with permanently sodden underwear). Said demon-cum-geography teacher would gleefully march us around for hours and hours whilst enthusiastically pointing out such greats as High Force waterfall (it's just water falling for God's sake) and the excellent employment of arable farming techniques (no, it's just a bunch of bloody sheep in a field).

However, the culmination of this jolly affair was the fabled night hike in which we'd venture out in the pitch black, armed with torches that might as well have been solar-powered, compasses that'd been stored on top of magnets and OS maps from the 70s which ominously declared most of the surrounding area to be an Army testing range. Not to mention the huge reservoir, which on a cloudy night was pretty much invisible!

To cap it all off, we'd be sent out in groups of 4-5 and told to follow a pretty ropey orienteering course... whilst being stalked from afar by said geography teacher. Perhaps my most memorable experience of the night hike was when one of my mates claimed to have stood in the mightiest of all cowpats, and on closer inspection turned out to be a rotting sheep carcass.

Apologies for length - but it's blatantly Chickenwire's fault...

*pop*
(Rikardo Montavon, Fri 8 Dec 2006, 1:09, Reply)