The supposed 5 hour drive to West Virgina (also known as the mountain state) ended up taking 9 hours. The state has the largest sycamore tree in the world, and is famous for its golden delicious apples, and the movie 'Patch Adams'. Fun facts i thought!

We arrived at the Adventures on the Gorge camp site at about 1800 to discover a beautiful woody area with loads of space to pitch our tents. 'Team A' took charge of dinner and made an impressive spag boll, and we then spent the evening playing cards, 'Cheat' to be exact, or 'Bulls***' as we ended up caliing it. A lot of laughing and cheating was involved, and we all had a lot of fun.

Next came Adrenaline day! White water rafting on the New River to start with. Adter a safety brief and a 15 minute bus journy down to the river, we donned our life vests and fetching blue helmets, grabbed a paddle and hauled our little yellow raft in to the river under supervision of our insyructor Seth, who looked like a bit of a crazy surfer dude and spoke with a classic southern twang. We were taught the specific commands needed to get us 9 miles down the river where our bus was to collect our bashed up broken bones. The river itself was beautiful and I was gutted i couldn't have a camera with me to take a record of the scenery. High cliffes at either side with lush green trees, huge boulders at the river sides and matched with a beautifully clear warm day, it was stunning. We paddled gently down the river to start with whilst soaking up the scenery and we then came to our first rapid, a class 3 so not a big deal but when its your first its still intkmidating! It's so much fun going down them but 25% of you is saying 'don't fall out, dont fall out'. Thankfully nobody did, ans no injuries were sustained. We did have two opportunities to jump out and swim in the river though and let the current take us about a mile down river, maybe further. That was fabulous. So relaxing, but both myself and Dainey got the giggles when she said, 'this is so relaxing, and you feel so safe don't you' just as we looked up and saw we were heading, at speed, straight for a massive bolder. We swam out of the way in time and then fell in to uncontrollable giggles for the next ten minutes.

Back in the boat we headed down more rapids, one class 5 which was immense fun, an thr professional photographer got some fabulous shots of the pleasure mixed with fear in our faces.

After three hours on the river we headed back to camp in our soggy shorts for some lunch and a bit of a chill before our next adrenaline rush. What was to come though was more than your standard rush!

We headed up in to the mountains to do zip lining. Speed and hights
Mixed together in to one exhilarating ride. You are strapped in to a harness, clipped on to a two inch thick steel cable (ehich i mah add you can hang a landrover off) and then 'zip' down the cable at speeds of up to 60mph, a few hundred feet in air and about 3150 feet from the other side feet. Its like driving on the M4 with nothing around you hundreds of feet in the air with te most stunning views ever, and lasts about 45 seconds. We started off with a 500 feet one and worked our way up to the biggen but how i did any of them i have no idea. Ive never been so scares to do something as I was on the first zipline, but I felt the fear and did it anyway. And soooooo glad I did. What a rush!

We made our way back to camp and my team cooked a jerk chicken and rice dinner which was delicious even if i do say so myself. After an adrenaline packed day, we were all in need of a drink and our tour guide had put together something she likes to call 'jungle juice' a lethal yet very tasty concoction of ridiculously large volumes of Vodka, cider (or some weird Americn equivalent), sugar, lemons and some Orange drink I don't know the name of. Not too bad I hear you say. You'd think wouldn't you! Well after a cup of this stuff I was particularly merry and after two cups me and fellow nurse Tara had to attempt to carry another girl back to her tent. Lethal I tell you!

Alabama tomorrow.....