My Own Montpellier Adventure

These past two days have been full of activity in Montpellier. After all, what fun would it be to watch an extreme sports festival and not try out any of the sports on our own? Yesterday, we took a wakeboarding lesson and rode a foot bike. The last few times I had been water skiing, I never quite made it up long enough to ride the waves, so I didn’t know what the outcome of this would be, but to my surprise and thrill, I made it up after falling two times and stayed up on the board for the length of the pool. Yes, we did it in the pool rather than the ocean, which was probably good since we were all first timers. It was such a freeing and exhilarating feeling when grabbing the chord and standing up on the board. The two time kite boarding world champion, Sebastian Garat was in attendance and he put on a great demonstration for us. We also had the opportunity to ride a foot bike, which was a lot of fun. The next day we took a trip to Herault, about a half an hour outside of Montpellier where we had the option to scale some mountains, also known as ferretta with the Aupalya Cevennes Agency in Saint Bauzille de Putois. After a hike up with our harnesses and helmets, we were shown how to walk along a thin wooden piece while clipping our harnesses on and off the string above. I usually am a pretty adventurous person, but all of a sudden I found myself overcome with fear to the point of tears. I’m not quite sure why I was so scared, as I’ve rock climbed and repelled before. Maybe it was the fact of walking along the side of the mountain rather than up and down. However, the rest of the group loved their experience which included a few zip lines and cave exploration. After a delicious lunch, we went canoeing through some fierce rapids, which was a ton of fun, except for the time that the canoe hit a rock that we couldn’t move and I went flying out and hit my foot against the rock and then preceded to get dragged down, hitting rock after rock before getting back on the boat. That’s when I realized why they tell you to wear sneakers! All in all, it was a great day and a lot of fun!