An Adventure Filled Day

My group had an incredible time bonding with one another.

I woke up earlier than usual this morning, with my incredibly loud alarm ringing at 6 AM. Today was the day of the Challenge Course, which many of the ILC Brown alumni I know have talked about very excitedly. Of course, many other students who attended the challenge course yesterday were eager to tell us that they had fun, but they refused to disclose any sort of information about what happened during their time there. All I knew was that I needed long leggings, a water bottle, a poncho, an umbrella, and some tick repellant socks to make sure they wouldn’t crawl up my pants.

The bus we rode on was a charter bus, and it only took us half an hour to get to our destination. It was a little cold when we arrived, but with a poncho, I was feeling warm and cozy. We started off by putting our belongings on a blue tarp, which ensured bugs wouldn’t come and crawl into our stuff. Afterwards, we all had a quick lecture by the coordinator about several precautions we needed to make before starting the course. The precautions revolved mostly around ticks, poisonous plants, and snakes that may appear around the area.

The other groups doing their own activities.

We were assigned to two of the facilitators Imani and Shuyen. There were 11 members in our team, so for several rounds of our activities, they would step in and also join the group. The first thing we performed was an ice breaker. It was the same ice breaker we did several days ago, where we tossed an object to a person and did it with either multiple objects or in reverse. Even though I already knew all of the group member’s names well, it was refreshing to get another chance to memorize them once again.

Our facilitators moved us to another activity, where the basic principle is getting our whole group from one side of a field to the other side using only seven pieces of carpeted board. The game was set up by first dividing up the people into groups, where we were asked for a location, situation, and land mass. We decided to choose Antarctica, on an island with a volcano, with shark infested waters. Our group struggled a lot at first, we ended up getting lots of consequences- such as one person being told to stay silent, another being blindfolded, and several boards taken away from us- that made us want to be more cautious about how we planned things out. We were able to accomplish finishing the task within half an hour, which was the time limit we set upon ourselves.

At one point I was carried to the other side since it was easier.

Walking the trail to the  Challenge Course.

Those three things were the highlight of my day. There were other activities we did that required lots of physical and creative strength, some examples would be team rope swinging, team log balancing, and partner rope walking. These all helped me make stronger bonds with my team, and helped me improve my confidence and leadership skills. I also liked the food the course provided for us, it’s been awhile since I’ve tasted watermelons. I’ve missed them a lot.

Yummy watermelons.

Today was full of adventure and discovery! I learned lots about teamwork, collaboration, and leadership from this experience. I would love to do it again because how much fun I had during the entire course.