Rare Adventures

Tag: health

La Fortuna – the best zip line adventure

Flying through the jungle canopy at 50mph

After a hectic first day in La Fortuna, checking out the Arenal scenery and wildlife from ground level it was time to take to the air and see the jungle from above.

One of the famous ways to see the Arenal jungle is to fly through the rain forest canopy on a series of zip wires. There are two options, the first involves 12 zip wires, but we opted for the 7 extreme zip wires, which seemed to offer a much more intense fun experience, and we get bored easily with the hanging around as you may have noticed.

The whole experience is really well organised, with a lot of care and explanation when assembling the safety harness. I had a bit of a problem as my Go Pro camera chest harness interfered with the safety harness. The guys were really helpful and provided an adapted helmet with a GoPro fitting so I could film the event.

Heading to the forest

Then the brave souls all piled into a huge trolley and were pulled up through the forest by a tractor, with more wildlife spotted on either side as we went along, but there wasn’t much to see other than a little deer which was no big deal but Wooksie did spot one of the venomous brown vipers, that live in dead leaves – not nice.

For our Extreme group, we got dropped at a huge tower that looked like an abandoned electricity pylon, so our first 10 mins were spent climbing up steps loaded down with harnesses and helmets. It was sweltering at the top and it seemed and eternity before we got underway.

First zip wire

In the video, Wooksie is first on to the wire, she loves a bit of altitude and speed, and she is sent off into the jungle at speeds that reach about 60kph, so nothing like the 150kph that we did in Snowdonia last year. As you can see from this video, I followed next and was despatched to my destiny.

In this video you can see the La Fortuna waterfall on the right, which is the same waterfall where we went swimming yesterday and had a 500 step climb back up. So, flying majestically over the top was quite an experience and less stressful than that climb.

After what felt like a clumsy landing, we were all climbing again up through the forest, loaded down with harnesses, to gain more height for the next zip wire. This run is the longest of the wires at 1000m, as this run picks up momentum it gets increasingly difficult to stay straight on the line and not rotate when it hits the maximum speed of about 70kph.

Longest zip wire in Costa Rica

In the video you can see me touching the wire to stop the rotation in the special glove. This rotation was partly caused by me moving my head to get better shots for the camera, the result was losing a bit of speed and as you can see, I didn’t quite make it to the landing zone, so had to monkey crawl the last 50m to the landing zone to avoid being rescued.

After losing momentum on the 2^nd run, I wasn’t going to get caught again so on the third run I kept everything straight, but unfortunately didn’t see the brake instruction from the guide and blew into the end zone too fast and now have a scar on my shin to prove it, unfortunately, the camera moved on the helmet and so you can only see sky on the way down so I haven’t included It the remaining 4 more rides were basically more of the same so we won’t bore you with more videos.

Tour of La Fortuna

Then it was back to the hotel for the big event of the day, catching up with our youngest daughter who has been travelling through central America, from Peru in the south to Mexico in the north, since the first week of May. We weren’t too sure what state she would be in.

As normally, we need not have worried as she was having a wonderful time. She is with a group that has travelled down from Mexico and finishes in San Jose at the weekend. We had always planned to meet up, but our schedules crossed so we had a great opportunity to meet her friends and have a fine evening in a bar sharing stories of our adventures.

Hotel Secreto La Fortuna

The first hotel we stayed in, called the Secreto La Fortuna, was tucked in near the town centre and had its own resident sloth sitting in a tree above reception. The visitors are all paying fortunes to see these creatures, it is $50 to go to the Sloth Sanctuary tour, but there are plenty living in the trees around the hotels, it is just knowing where to look for the fury bundles.

We spent the last day chilling and preparing for the next long drive down to the Pacific coast. For our last night stayed at another eco hotel called Lomas Volcan, which is built at the foot of the volcano. It was an amazing place with self-contained huts and swimming pool heated by the hot springs to a temperature similar to a hot tub, it is quite a weird experience. The hotel is in the jungle and its own jungle trail. After another heavy hike through the jungle there were no more animals to be found, though I might have spotted a toucan, but the vegetation is spectacular for people who have an interest in that sort of thing.

01/08/2025
From Business Owner to Adventurer: A Retirement Story
The challenges of letting go and embracing freedom

Being retired isn’t so easy when you have owned your own business for 23 years, and spent most of them hunting clients, delivering assignments under pressure whilst keeping the company together. So, in effect, when I declared that “I am done”, that was the start of the process.

After my daughter’s wedding, I was good to my word, I jumped in my VW Camper and headed to off-grid to the Highlands of Scotland with my dog Tess as company. Wooksie (my wife) asked how long I would be gone for, “more than a week, but less than 3”, and that was about as much planning as I had done. The trip to Scotland is a separate blog, but for here, I was gone 10 days, rejoiced in the freedom but eventually got bored with nothingness and made my way home.

I had been delivering a company strategy over the previous 5 years that moved all our services to digital online solutions depending on face-to-face service, this development work helped us through Covid and gave us a way out. We had reached a point 2 years previous where the change was done and in effect, we could deliver our services from anywhere in the world, we just needed a laptop to manage the whole thing. As I explained to Wooksie, we can now live on a yacht in the Bahamas, login every day to deal with requests and put our feet up.

At this point Wooksie pointed out that she doesn’t like yachts, the sea or the sun as she is a red head. This was the start of the first unexpected issue, my business partner of 23 years, who often complained she hated the job and wanted to leave, but who happened to be 12 years younger than me pointed out she wasn’t ready to retire.

Boom I didn’t see that one coming, I had a vision for a retirement full of fun, adventure and travel which wasn’t shared. I had always had this exit plan that we could have a business that would essentially run itself with minimal input from ourselves but give us an income, this was now seriously under threat.

This came as a real shock, but slowly we worked out how to make it work. The company would keep running to allow for a gradual transition as the hard-earned client based slowly withered. As I wouldn’t be doing the sales, account management and service development demand would inevitably drop off, which it did. This seemed a solution that worked for everyone, including the staff, as the last one was happy to retire in that timescale.

The first year was hard in other ways as well. I struggled to say, “I’m retired”, so when offers of work came in, I found it really hard to turn them away, as money is money and habits of a lifetime don’t change overnight.

Talking to others that had taken retirement from employment, they seemed to have different issues, but these helped me understand my challenges. If you go into work for an employer everyday of your life, when you stop work, you are faced with a void – suddenly you don’t have to get up, go into work or get on with your task list or routine. I’ve noticed these people seem to drift back into full time or part time jobs as they struggle to fill the void.

When you own and run a business, it is different, you live that business 24 hours a day, clients, staff, finances, suppliers, payment is in your head 24 all the time, and you are the escalation point for everything, so saying you are retired doesn’t change much. What does change is that your energy and ambition is no longer driving the business forward with an eye on the strategic challenges and opportunities, but this takes time to take effect.

The challenge for me was that I wanted this stuff out of my head as I had mentally moved on and opened a new chapter in my life, but the business was sucking me back in. We also faced a number of unexpected challenges from government bodies that undermined the 5 years of investment in that business model and the services we had developed, which was hugely frustrating for me and our customers but helped with marking the end for the team, the company was over.

To be honest, in that first year of supposed retirement the company were hit by these unexpected missiles, we might even have decided to call it a day anyway. A number of our competitors of 20 years did make that decision, but it was a tough year for all of us, and we found a way though as we always do.

It wasn’t just work that was changing, at home we had one daughter heading into her last year at university and youngest son had just finished A levels and was heading for university. There was a lot of disruption at home too, this isn’t the normal retirement scenario for most people, having 2 kids at university and having to shut down a business!

By the end of summer, Wooksie had warmed to the idea of less work, but not enough to consider living on a yacht in the Bahamas. As a way of marking the start of a new era, she came up with the idea of doing the Inca Trail in Peru (BBC’s Race Round the World helped a lot with the transition !), this was something we had planned 20 years early but pregnancy put an end to that, So 5 days after youngest son went to Liverpool Uni, we were on a flight to Peru to open our new chapter. It was great trip, but not without incidents that will be part of the travel blog in due course.

The real benefit was that it started to draw a line under being the dedicated business owners and always on tap parents, though mobile phones still worked in Peru 😊.

Even though I was trying to stop working, I settled for “running down” as I was back in the office 2 or 3 days a week, but I did offload the baggage of “attendancism”, and moved to a “work to live” mode rather than a “live to work” mode.

This worked, I continued delivering limited client assignments to keep the company accounts in good shape and in truth, when winter came along, I was glad of the company of the team. I’d go to the gym or meet a mate for coffee, but head to the office to help and have a chat with the girls.

The first year ended the following April undertaking a progress review for a client. This was a review of recommendations I had made 18 months earlier that had been reported to the top-level board in that organisation. The board approved the report and funded the implementation of the recommendations.

My review was to check on progress with the consultancy that had been given the task of delivering our recommendations. What became evident was that hardly any progress had been made, in fact, they had implemented things we had said should NOT happen.

At a workshop, I asked the group, “did any of you actually read my report and recommendations”. there was silence. Millions had been spent on this consultancy to implement our recommendations, and, they did what they thought should happen not what they were commissioned to do, and the things they implemented were the things that had repeatedly failed in the past.

At this point, I was completely exasperated. I honestly concluded I was wasting my life doing this sort of work when I could have been out having fun, the money was obviously nice but most of it goes on tax anyway, so what was the point.

12 months on from “I’m done”, I had another big moment where I realised my hunger for money was gone as well, and I didn’t want to waste my time advising people who were going to ignore me. I now really wanted to get on with my next chapter.

I discussed this with my old friend Ugly Bloke in May; he had managed his transition at a much younger age and was a good sounding board for me. He didn’t believe that I was going to call it a day, so I wrote down some promises about what I would and wouldn’t do in the next 12 months, because I still did have obligations to the team. He looked after the notes on a napkin and The Ugly Bloke commitments proved very powerful when I had a big decision to make in the next year.

Lessons from the first year

So, what are my conclusions from that first year:
- You can’t just walk away from something that has taken 20 years to create it is hard to walk away from the old habits and behaviours, it’s different to retiring from a job. However, you can make promises to yourself about the scope of what is acceptable and test it out.
- Having an epiphany, where you realise it’s time for change, helps the motivation to make the change, it is very hard not looking back. I used to advise clients they had to “mark the end” of the old ways before change can happen, this applied to me too.
- Making assumptions about people around you, what they want and need, how fast the world is changing undermines plans all the time.
- Signature adventures – the trip to Peru marked a major change in our life, it enabled planning future adventures to places we had never been, like Patagonia, safaris, and other adventures we can look forward to, in fact, they start to take over your life.
So, moving into the second year, I am now openly talking about being “retired”, though I prefer to say being “finished with work”. I have my commitments to Ugly Bloke to uphold, so let’s see how it goes.
13/07/2025
Midge Attacks and Trails: Kielder Forest rides

Kielder Forest, Gremlins and Midge attacks

The daylight was fading in the grey wet skies as we set off from Grisdale. Our next destination was Kielder Forest on the border with Scotland, after a long rainy night, and being soaking wet after the trails, the advice from the Satnav that it was nearly 3 hours drive wasn’t particularly welcome.

The journey out of the Lake District was slow and very wet. There were waterwalls cascading out of the cliffs everywhere, roads with rivers running across them, it is amazing how much water 2 inches of rain on mountains can produce. It occurred to me that I would probably never have another holiday in the Lake District so I might as well try to enjoy these views, the floods will be my permanent memory of the Lake District.

Road to Scotland

The route to Kielder Forest campsite took us over the border into Scotland and a 3 hour drive through the Kielder National park. I managed to lose my mate in the Jeep, who was a bit quicker than my old van and our route was rather meandering and my GPS seemed to be sending me in a different direction, so we decided to make our way separately to the camp site. We later realised I was using Waze, which had a different view of the borders than the Apple route.

Gremlins strike

Gremlin Strike – I should have guessed, the Gremlin was in the satnav. It took me off the main road on to narrow single track roads but when it turned into a mountain pass with just gravel I decided it was trying to kill me, so I gingerly turned the van around on the edge of a cliff and headed back to civilisation and the long way round.

Eventually I arrived at the campsite where my mate was getting organised. What we hadn’t expected was the storm of midges that awaited us, clearly the Gremlin had recruited its mates to help out with it’s attack on me and the van.

Midge Attack

We couldn’t eat outside thanks to the midges, the pub had stopped serving food, so we had a “date night” in the van, very cosy with tinned ravioli and tinned hot dogs. We then headed for the pub where we found a Newcastle United fan in his club shirt, and he seemed to know amazingly little about his team, either that or he couldn’t understand out southern accents.

Next morning, the weather was a bit better, and we set off on our bike ride. These rides were much better than the day before, but it is a vast area, but we had some exciting rides. There was heavy damp clouds and regular downfalls to keep us focused, but we clocked up over 30 kms.

Kielder Trails

There was a great new area with a couple of new red runs to get the adrenalin running. As with all good things, there was a downside, the climbs back up but the e-bikes make life a lot easier as we get older. This is the new track called the EE Mile.

This was followed by another red run called “Run into the Valley”, the camera missed the first section which was fantastic and the second extension was infested with low tree branches and gave our faces a good slapping on the way through but all good fun, here it is and watch out for the branches that hit me in the face.

The day ended with a long climb to the top of the mountain and a big red run, that went on for ages and dropped us down through the mists into the car park.

The top bit was still thick in cloud and we found the rest of the trail despite the signs sending us the wrong way again.

As the altitude dropped the visibility got better. The Trail splits on the way down but we worked out which way to go (not helped by the map) and then we picked up the big trail back into the car park, not overly complicated but plenty of speed on the way down.

Heading to Hamsterley Forest

Back to the car park the midges were waiting for us, and took full advantage our tiredness and attacked in full throttle. As we departed the rain started to fall again, so time to head south through the North Pennines and heading for Hamsterley Forest and our next ride and maybe some decent weather.

The 3 hour drive down from Keilder towards Consett took us along some amazing old Roman roads, they were incredible. We all learned in school about how the Romans built their roads straight, well you could really see it in that area, they just went straight over the tops of hills and down the other side – absolutely ideal for cars to overtake my camper van so I didn’t feel like a mobile traffic jam.

Having seen the countryside around the borders it is absolutely no surprise that the Romans decided to build Hadrian’s Wall to stop the Scots raiding. It is a desolate and remote place full of natural beauty, I guess the surprise is that they bothered staying that far north at all, Scots, Midges and Gremlins, and they thought a wall would save them – obviously having a laugh,

We ended up at our third campsite in the foothills of the North Pennines, more lovely people and still freezing cold in the middle of summer but at least it was dry. So, we courageously had a BBQ in the biting winds that whipped cross the hills and dried out some of our cloths.

Then we took our beer into the camp kitchen and recreation room, where it was at least warm. Armed with a couple of cold cans of beer we turned on the TV, up popped the Blues Brothers film, a chance to watch a Hollywood classic, in the eyes of some people anyway. After 30 minutes I gave up trying to watch it for the umpteenth time, and it turns out, it was the same for my mate.

Next morning we woke to bright sunshine and finally, some warm weather. I was up early, made my mate a cup of tea in bed and we had a proper camp breakfast of bacon, sausage, eggs and bacon – we were ready for a big day.

Hamsterley Forest here we come, I’d even found my missing trainer hidden under the dashboard, but still no sigh of the book.

11/07/2025
My weight loss journey: 7 Years of Transformation

As my youngest daughter pointed out, I’ve probably had an extra 10 years of life thanks to the weight loss.

This graph tracks my weight from the start of the journey in Episode 1 back in 2017, to where I am today. As you can see, it has been a bit of a roller coaster with lots of ups and downs.

I never expected to maintain it the mid 13 stone lower levels but I have managed to keep it within a reasonable boundary in the mid 14 stones, which was roughly 2 stone lighter than my norm before I started so that has been really good.

Click here to follow the rest of My Weight Loss Journey

This has had a radical impact on my life, I have been absolutely amazed what abuse the body of a 60 something can take, just keep pushing it as far as it will go but listen carefully to what you body is saying.

7 years ago I was a workaholic, in 2018 I became a sort of dietaholic, and then moved on to being a sort fitnessaholic which gave me an overall much better worklife balance and helped me along the road to retirement.

Being lighter made me so much happier, I always hated tight cloths so being able to walk around in smaller sizes and not having them stretching the seems was great for self confidence.

But I lived in fear of putting the weight back on, and going back to the bigger me and having to go through the battle to lose weight, I didn’t want to have to do that again as it felt like a one off experience.

You have to watch your calorie consumption constantly if you have an appetite for food and beer like mine. In the graph you can see the drops, that is normally after a holiday or there is a particular challenge coming up and I start calorie counting, that tends to focus the mind on what you are eating, you avoid the snacks and know the cost of alcohol so don’t do it – or at least make the right choices.

The company team entered the 10km together for charity, it was a first time for all of us

I am constantly setting targets, I hated running but decided to do the Bristol 10km as a challenge, I ended up running 10km twice a week and eventually did a half marathon.

During Covid, I used the time to cycle. I cut down on the mountain biking as I guessed I wouldn’t be popular in hospital if I had a crash, so started doing longer rides, 50km, then 100km and finally 100 miles in a day – these were tough but so glad I’ve done them, and all of them on my own without support of a group.

Running a half marathon distance, on my own was a massive adrenalin rush.

In fact, I then found out the qualifying time of the GB Over 60 Triathlon team run and managed to achieve it in a 5km sprint, at this point I decided I had to stop somewhere at that was it.

The day I cracked the sub 25 min 5km at 61, on a wet January afternoon, just for fun !

I had my hip replaced last year after I smashed it on a mountain bike fall in France, but within 2 weeks I was back in the gym, 4 weeks did 50km on the bike and 6 weeks I was back playing football because if you keep yourself fit and have reasonable control of your weight there is surprisingly few things you can’t do and overcome.

Up and about straight after the op, walking without crutches after a week and back in the gym after a month!

So that’s it, after the diet you need to find your equilibrium and focus on staying in that zone.

I am normally about 14st 8lb now, I’m happier a few pounds less but if I start to go too much above it then it is time to start calories counting again !

See the rest of my Weight loss journey posts.

30/04/2025
My weight loss journey: Myth busters
The key lessons from my 7 years of managing my weight

I learned a lot from doing Man v Fat, we all did really well, losing 10-20% of our weight over 4 months. It was lots of fun but very competitive as well.

Click here to follow the res of My Weight Loss Journey

The basic principle is that our bodies are machines that need fuel.

Calories in (food) v Calories out (exercise) = weight

Too much input and the body stores it for a rainy day, too much output and the body calls on its reserves to survive and burns the fat. We are still Mk 1 human beings and our bodies know how to survive, they just don’t know too much about modern living and junk food !

To lose weight you have to reduce incoming and increase outgoing. Trying to lose weight just on exercise is very very hard, 1lb in weight is 3500 calories, so to lose 1lb through exercise you need to do 7 x 500kcal sessions in the gym, or walk up Snowdon once a week (roughly what I burned doing that).

So basically this is a calorie burning project, there are lots of ways to do it, diets, exercise, fasting – loads of options, but the only thing that matters is reducing input and increasing output.

A few common things that I’ve learned to dismiss.
1. A male needs 2500 per day – not convinced about this one. We are all different and if I took in 2500 every day I’d be the size of an elephant, and I do loads of exercise.
2. Muscle turns to fat – nope, it turns to flab, which is different, it can be rebuilt, this is why athletes use steroids, once a muscle has been grown, it can always go back to the maximum size.
3. Turn fat in muscle – nope, burn off the fat, it cant turn into muscle, that needs protein and fibre.
4. Muscle burns calories faster – this is actually true but if you start doing weights you will get heavier so this is something for 3 months down the track. I’ve got mates who are the literal muscle brick shit houses and they do burn calories but they are unique. We don’t want minor weight gains in muscles affecting your weight downward trend.
Your action plan

So what we need is the tools to manage our calories, so here goes
1. Get the myfitnesspal app – this is where you log your food and it also pulls in the data from your exercise tracker to work out your daily score.
2. Exercise tracker – you can do this on a phone but it is much better with a watch that is counting steps and importantly heart rate. I’ve got a Garmin because of the other sports, but Apple and the others are just as good.
3. Linking the two can be a bit of a faff because it involves personal data permissions but stick with it.
So for the first week, get the tools set up and you can start tracking your food intake.

Food intake – don’t get bogged down in being too precise, I spend about 2 minutes a day on this max. Most of the food we eat is available in the tracker, it’s just working out the portion sizes.
28/04/2025