Day trip to TCA Bristol

[sawyl]

Day trip to The Climbing Academy in Bristol. The journey up was pretty uneventful and we had a spectacular view of the Clifton Suspension Bridge comming along the A4. We got ever so slightly lost after missing the A370 exit of the A3029 but after a swift recovery, we still managed to arrive almost precisely on schedule.

The Mothership in the process of being reset for a comp. It's not a great shot — I've really got to work out how frame things with the tablet camera — but it gives a good general impression of the place.

Pert Vert on the left, the endurance board on the right, the woody training board in the background and, just visible through the arch, the symmetric board with the fluro green holds.

We had a nice afternoon of bouldering, flashing most of the problems on the font 5–6a circuit and working those on the more difficult 6a–6c circuit, but without much joy. So more-or-less in-line with expectations and abilities, although checking the route map post-event, I'm pretty sure some of the black circuit problems were actually of our own imagining: two officially separate problems coupled with a massively reachy span in the middle. Fun though.

On the way back we took the motorway route, going M32, M4, M5 back to Devon. The journey wasn't great, with slow traffic and so many ambulances and police and blood transfusion vans flashing past on the hard shoulder we were more than slightly worried about what we'd see once we past the pinch points. But in every case it turned out to be a broken down car or lorry rather than the pile up we'd half expected and things started to flow again once we were past Clevedon.