Sterling Adventures

As reported by Ian already, the much anticipated Sterling Adventures blog author’s rendezvous took place this weekend. We’d chosen North Yorkshire for the event because it offered lots of local adventuring opportunities, and a convenient hut for us all to stay in. Although, as Ian also hinted at, the state of Greenclose was shocking! Caving huts are never very clean or orderly places, but add a bunch of students into the mix and disease won’t be far behind!

Rock Climbing, Twistleton
We met in Bernies cafe in Ingleton on Saturday morning and decided that the glorious sunny weather was best spent rock climbing. But before we headed off to the crag Laetitia handed out the uniform for the weekend – Blackpool’s finest line of t-shirts, each imprinted with the blogger’s name and role…

Not a bad turn out…

Bloggers; Pete, Richard, Rachel, Ian, Anna, Paul, Laetitia, and Dave

We’d chosen Twistleton, an impressive spot with routes of all grades to help with one of the aims of the weekend – to introduce each other to each other’s adventure sports; today being to get Richard and Rachel out of their comfort zone on a few rock climbs. Tomorrow would be the chance for the climbers to get uncomfortable in a cave!

The views across to Ingleborough were too tempting for our energetic fell-runners Richard and Rachel to ignore. After a few climbs they left us to run up Ingleborough and back. We thought they were joking, it’s miles away and much higher! They weren’t! Luckily though they are really fast and got back just in time to share their cakes with us.

Adventure Bloggers’ BBQ
After that it was time to get back to Greenclose (via Booths in Settle to buy some BBQ food). Of course first we had to clean everything we used, or thought we might use, to ensure no-one caught a dose of listeria or salmonella (or likely both!).

Greenclose BBQ

Recently Lucozade had asked me to publish a “guest post” publicising their Summer Challenges. We shared the rewards out to all the adventure bloggers…

Lucozade rewards!

Ian and Anna fighting over the last burger!

Richard explains to Laetitia how running up Ingleborough was steep, but "Oh so easy!"

After the BBQ it was time for more cake! We like cake! Especially after a good day of adventuring!

Cake!

Prizes!
And then, some blogging stats and prizes!

• Ian definitely won the prize as the most prolific adventure blogger.
• Closely followed by the Wainright completing David.
• The absent Terry got a special mention as the most travelled blogger, having written 23 posts from countries other than England!
• Rachel’s post about last year’s flooded OMM was noted as the post with the most readers in a single day. We also toasted Rachel’s scoop announcement via the blog of her engagement to Richard.
• The absent Dave’s picture of Clive in Juniper Gulf was picked out as the most highly rated picture.
• Colin’s dry humour in his numerous comments raised a chuckle or two!
• Pauls’s comment on breaking his wrist and scuppering his rock climbing trip to Australia was perhaps the saddest comment to date.
• Anna’s penchant for cats won her a special cat mask!
• Richard was complemented on racking up the most miles, having blogged from China, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, France and all over the British Isles!

It’s been an amazing success, we now regularly get over one million hits every month!
A massive Thank You to everyone!

Ian poses in his Most-Prolific-Blogger prize sunglasses!

Laetitia examines a “something” made with Richard’s prize, a set of modelling balloons celebrating the posts about balloon beds.

Caving
Sunday was the day to put the climbers out of their comfort zone and go caving! Over to Richard to report that…