For Goodgym York, Sunday is never a day of rest (particularly in the midst of the January Challenge!) and the last day of our 8th birthday weekend away was no exception. Most of the weekend crew took a detour on the way home to help out the lovely folk at Langdale School in Chapel Stiles - which, despite rumours, had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they'd installed a pizza oven since we last visited in January 2024...

Our task owners had once again prepared an epic list of things for us to do and Storm Éowyn had put in some extra effort to make sure that we didn't run out of tasks in the two hours that we were there.

We quickly split off into different groups to complete:

• Sandpit tidying

• Leaf clearing

• Soil barrowing (with comedy sized barrows - both too small and too big. 'Just right' was nowhere to be seen)

• Forest school debris clearing

• Dead hedging

• Deck scrubbing

• Polytunnel tidying and maintenance

• Weeding

• Something that Mitch and Neil were proud of completing which involved a big water tank and some pipes

• General tidying up in the aftermath of Storm Éowyn

While we got stuck in, I lost count of the number of people who declared that they "would have loved to gone to a school like this!" There was certainly no shortage of folk trying out the various dens that were dotted around the forest school.

Our final, very important job was to test out the pizza oven. Gavin and the rest of the school team did a sterling job of pumping out slices of freshly-made pizza while the group huddled around the pizza oven to warm their cold hands.

33 full tummies later, we were ready to tackle the journey home to rest up, and get our GGs washed and ready for our last group run of the January Challenge on Monday.