Work Event - Hochseilepark

A couple of weeks ago we had a "team building" event that was to be a big surprise. My boss just told us all to be prepared for some fun outdoor activity that was quite sporty. Not knowing what to expect, we all prepared ourselves and hoped for good weather. As it turned out, we went down to Lake Constance to a "Hochseilepark" where a sort of obstacle course is set up in the tree tops.

You need to navigate your way through various ropes, bridges, obstacles to get to the end, all between 20-50 feet off the ground.
There was two groups there, mine, representing Inkjet supplies, and our neighbours, who are consumer business development. Surely those names bring out images of a real sports crowd. First we had to get all equipmented up in our safety gear. Here is the group, I am on the far right.
First we had our safety instruction and directions. This was all in German, which did not build confidence in the non-germans there. We had Canadians, Hungarians, Italians, Belgians, Americans, Austrians, and Swedish folks in the group. We are quite an international group. Next we were off to climb up into the trees and get started. As an added bonus, I was nominated to go first. Do I look like the sort wanting to blaze the trail? no. But I went anyway, it at least let me get photos of the rest of the group from the front. A couple of these photos were taken by my colleague's camera, especially those with me in them. In the first image, you can see me leading the way as my colleagues look on in awe at my majesty.

The first few obstacles were not too tough and not that high yet. but you did need to watch your balance and not be afraid of falling off. Despite a pretty strong fear of heights, I had no problems. The harness and rope pretty much put me at ease and I did not feel scared at all. In fact, only one person from the whole group backed out as being afraid, you can look back at the group photo and try to guess who it was. The first photo here is my boss Jaimi, giving directions, the second is one of the members of my mini-group, Sarah. We split into threes to navigate the course, as each tree platform could hold three maximum.

One of the more interesting obstacles was the "tarzan swing" where you swung on a rope from one platform to another. Harder than it looks. Here is Robert preparing to go and Sybille in Action.

We did get pretty high off the ground at some points. Here is Magdalena walking across a bridge of sticks and a high platform with Andras and Sybille on top:

Another scary one looked simple, it was two barrel like structures that you had to crawl through, but going between them was not so easy, they wobbled a lot and it was pretty scary to look straight down between them with nothing there until the ground. It was quite a bit harder for very short people. Here is Sarah going through them.

All in all a very fun event, kudos to my boss for the selection, I plan to go back there on my own time to try this again as a fun thing to do, I think Claudia would have fun here as well. It is only about two hours from my house and it is surprisingly inexpensive. It only costs 9 Euro for three hours including all equipment, not bad at all and after three hours you are pretty pooped.