Slacklines - Outdoor adventure play

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What is a slackline?  It's basically a strap / rope (I believe it's officially called webbing) that you set up between two trees (or anything else that won't move!).  At the first tree you loop the strap round the tree then at the second you ratchet it tight and basically create a tightrope.  Very good fun for adventurous kids and HAS to be done outdoors.

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To give you a better idea of what I mean this is similar to the Slackline we bought...

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Still not sure how it works?  If you click through to Amazon on the above picture there is a picture with instructions or check out the pictures below and hopefully it becomes obvious.

We visited a local forest and that's where we did our slacklining.  Our slackline is 16 metres long, so you can get a really great long line to walk on and lots of choice as to which trees you can put it between.  I believe you can also get tree protectors, but with only young children using ours I don't think the trees even had a scratch on them!

So how do we use our slackline?  Mostly like a tightrope, which the boys love, Champ in particular believes he is destined to join the circus as a strongman, apparently by age ten he wants to start practicing throwing daggers, but I digress!

Next up we created a 'zip line' using a stick and Hubby wizzing the boys along, although we reckon if you put one end of the line a lot higher than the other end you could have a go at creating a very basic zip line, for kids at least.

We did also catapult a few pine cones, but I didn't get any pics as I was a bit busy trying to stop this little man running after either dogs or getting in the line of fire of the catapulting pine cones!

It was great fun, feels incredibly adventurous (yes I have had a go!) and clearly was so much fun we had several families come up and ask if their kids could join in, quite the seal of approval.

And when the slacklining was done, there's always time for some stick sword fighting!

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