The boarders have a brilliant day out at Monkey World in glorious sunshine

An action-packed day of fabulous food, a trip to Monkey World and all the fun of a really good adventure playground.

After one of the amazing Hazlegrove Sunday morning breakfasts, we headed off to chapel where Mr Robertson encouraged us to overcome our fears. We left letter writing until later as we were keen to get to Monkey World as early as possible. We packed our very own monkeys into the minibuses and set off to get down to some serious monkeying around!  After an eventful journey with navigation required around hundreds of motorbikes and a fallen tree we arrived. A quick snack and then we hit the monkeys: chimps, orangutans, marmosets...the list goes on. 

Monkey World is a sanctuary and we came across many heart-wrenching tales of how the monkeys came to be in this Dorset haven. Many had travelled thousands of miles or experienced severe cruelty and some had never been outdoors before arriving there. So it was amazing to see them playing on their playgrounds, swinging through trees and generally having a really fun time. In fact, we were all quite jealous of their 'adventure playgrounds' so it was with relief that after a packed lunch we made our way to surely one of the best playgrounds in the south-west. 

Rope passageways, slides, swings, it was absolutely fantastic and a brilliant time was had by all. Several of the adults couldn't resist temptation and were soon running along the treetops with the children. What was particularly pleasing to see was that the Hazlegrove children instinctively went to the aid of younger children from outside of the school community and it was nice to hear several compliments from people around and about.

Then back to the buses and a return to school where we discovered that in comparison to our sunny weather there had been rather a lot of rain. Feeling very fortunate, we got down to letter writing then went swimming or enjoyed some free time before ending with a roast to round off a great day.
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Click here to see the photographs of the day in our Flickr album.