Swimming at Liberec

After all the touring that we have done lately, we decided to book a week-end that was purely for the kids. We had been promising the girls for the whole summer that we would make a plan to take them to a pool, and so decided that we would find an aqua park and spend the week-end on slides and in pools.

This is one of the things that the girls miss the most. In ZA the entire summer is spent in the pool, there's one 5m from the front door! Here, it's a different game, living in apartments means no pool nearby, not even a paddle pool like you'd find in a town-house complex. Public venues are the only viable alternative, (or friends with a pool - Mike and Stepanka are the girls heroes for being so generous with their pool!) and this makes swimming quite a rare thing. Add to this the absence of nearby beaches, the reluctance of parents to swim in public waters and you have a pair of girls starved for swimming. Poor things - hopefully we will remedy this now that we have a pool within walking distance, and some regular lessons in the offing.

Looking nice there baby :D

The entire complex is indoors - can only be when you're this far North - and all things taken together, it was a great experience. The kids had an absolute ball and got brave enough to do some pretty decent tube slides... hundreds of them actually - it was Dad's job to wait at the bottom of the slide and catch flying babies, pass them on to the steps so that they could scoot up to the top for the next descent.

It takes some discernment and practice to sift your own kid from the stream of little (and sometimes really big) bodies coming down the slides though. When we were first getting the method worked out, I would wait in the pool at the bottom of the slide, Hayley would take the girls up to the top of the slide and teach them how to read the timer at the top of each slide. The theory is, that, when obeyed, this timer spaces sliders wide enough apart so that there are no collisions on, or after the tube ride. In practice the timers can tend to be more of a vague suggestion than a hard rule. I was to discover the merits of having a timer...

So, watching from the pool at the bottom of the slide, I could see the wife and kids a the top of this particular slide, there were others that were a little more tricky, but we'll get to that later... The plan was, that, just before embarking on the slide, girls to go first, followed by mom, that they would wave to me, signaling their departure. By this, I would know that one more body should plop out of the slide, and then, the next person should be baby number one. Which is how it worked out for both girls. The first one came down at speed, can't remember which it was now, Amber I think, anyway, the catch was completed perfectly and she bobbed in the water while we waited for Saz to come down the tube.

After a few seconds, sure enough Saz appeared around the bend and I prepared to catch her. She was going at a good pace, but what neither of us suspected was that her mom was right behind her going at about 10 times faster. I knew there was going to be trouble. Saz was completely unaware of the speeding mom behind her. I caught her and turned away from the slide immediately, as I got myself between Saz and the slide, mom, without brakes of any kind at her disposal, smacked into us. It was quite something... the force of the impact sent us both underwater and pushed me completely off my feet. Poor Saz fortunately didn't feel much of the thump but got a good dunking. Not fazed about being torpedoed by her mother she set off for the top of the slide again - she is still fearless...

Can't wait to get rid of those arm-bands... roll on swimming lessons!

Sarah without a runaway mom behind her.

The complex we swam at is huge with many different, some quite unique slides. The other tame-ish slide the girls tried was a longer version of the red one you see pictured here. Its mouth is about 5m to the right of this one, but you can't see the top of the slide from the mouth... So, it was agreed, that when the girls were en-route, they would call to make sure I was ready to catch them. The idea was that they would get to the last set of curves and scream, or call out. What happened in practice though was that they began calling from the moment their little bums touched the slide at the top. The result was loud calling... "Daaaad!!! Daaaad!!! Daaaad!!!" coming from the roof of the complex and tracing the route of the yellow slide. Crude as it may have been, and attract attention it did, it worked just fine! If there's noise in a place - the Woods are there.

The most novel water slide I've ever seen was one with a standard tube, perfectly straight but descending at a heck of a rate. The drop is made in complete darkness, so there is no clue that a turn is coming, and then the tube empties out into what looks like a giant, curved funnel. If toilet bowls were spherical, this would have been a giant toilet bowl. Anyway, you get shot out of the tube into this bowl, going at a cracking speed. At which, your momentum makes you swirl round the bowl in a helix until you eventually are going slow enough to drop out of the hole in the bottom into the pool below.

Here is Jane Public doing her slide...

In case you are vaguely interested in where Liberec (say Liberets) is in relation to other things, it's up in the north of the CR - see the map below.