At the very start of TY (the 28th of August 2017) we were given the opportunity to bond with our new classes and take part in water sports. When the trip was first mentioned to us I laughed at the concept of extending our friendship circles and meeting new people because I felt I knew the whole year for the past three years. To my surprise I soon realised how many people I really didn’t know that well in my year group. So I decided, in the spirit of TY, to really throw myself into all the new experiences that came my way! Now after that cheesy introduction here’s what we got up to!
DAY 1: After a 5 hour bus journey filled with chats, songs and throwback tunes we arrived, in the wild west! To me it was very familiar surroundings as I head down to Mayo every summer but to many of my classmates I think they were in a bit of culture shock. We arrived and headed to our rooms where we all began our most difficult challenge the day would offer, trying to find some good old 3G. We then headed down for lunch and were divided up into groups. This was yet again another opportunity to have a bit of craic and mix with a new group of people. We were then thrown into our activities and water sports. My group was first up for canoeing, followed by some team building activities which consisted of building a cart. This was fairly straight forward for everyone except my group! We managed to put all the bolts in the wrong places! We then had dinner followed by some chill time until the céilí began. The céilí was one of my favourite parts of the trip as everyone let loose and danced their socks off! We then headed to bed which, as you can imagine, was filled with lively chats and lots of craic.
Day 2: We woke up at 7:30 sharp which definitely wasn’t the highlight! Then we went down to breakfast and headed out for the day. We did a very wide variety of sports and activities throughout the day. This consisted of surfing, wind surfing, climbing and team building activities. These all posed different challenges that we had to overcome in groups, individually and there was something new for everyone. After dinner that evening we tried out Archery and the egg challenge. For the egg challenge we had to work in groups to figure out a way of protecting our egg from breaking from a drop of 20 feet drop. Then exhausted, we headed up to bed.
Day 3: The last day of the trip was filled with another mixture of activities including pier jumping and shape construction. We were all a bit wrecked but made so many magical memories. We headed back to Dublin and all stopped off to get some much needed Mc Donald’s!
On behalf of fourth year we would all like to sincerely thank the Instructors and Ms. O’Reilly, Ms. Beatty and Ms.Crinion for all their enthusiasm to make this wonderful experience possible.
By Ellen McKimm. (4B)