On the 16th of September, 8 junior students competed in the Get2Go challenge in Queenstown.

We competed in 3 challenges throughout the day, mountain biking, kayaking and orienteering.

This was a great opportunity for us to get to know some of our peers that we didn’t know very well. We were also exposed to different challenges that we hadn’t had a lot of experience with before.

Before the big day Mr Meechang taught us how to take the wheels off our Mountain bikes and how to repair a puncture. It was great to learn some of these skills that we might need in the future.

On Friday we meet at school at 7am. After a few forgotten items were dropped off we hit the road! When we arrived in Queenstown, Darren the Hillary Outdoor education leader briefed us on the days activities.

We kicked into the mountain biking right away. We had to do a little loop that took about 2 minutes to complete. While riding you needed to memorise a grid with different colours and symbols on it, we were given an answer sheet to write these down on. Once you had completed a lap you gave the bike to one of your teammates, and rotated around the group to do the loop. We did mountain biking for an hour.

Next we went down to the lake to complete the kayaking stage we had 45 minutes to do this. You went in 3’s in one kayak on a wee loop around the lake. You had to complete as many loops as you could in the allocated time. After we finished we all went for a wee dip.

Lastly, we had orienteering where we were split in half so teams of 4 the girls and the boys. One group went one way and the other group went the other. We had 70 minutes to complete this task. There were some QR codes around Kelvin Heights you had to scan which were all worth different amounts of points. It was pretty challenging but we had fun.

To reward ourselves we got some Maccas afterwards and headed home. Thank you to Miss Murch and Mrs Van Niekerk for taking us. It was a great day and we are excited about future opportunities.