When my best mate asked me to organise his stag do I decided to go all out and plan a wild weekend away in Nottingham. As well as the standard stag night out I wanted something to keep the boys busy during the day too, and when you're in Nottingham there's only one option – an archery experience! The lads were well up for giving it a go, and even though none of us had tried archery before we couldn't wait to be let loose with bows and arrows.
Before I booked our archery experience I double-checked we'd be allowed to dress the stag up, so when we arrived with him dressed Maid Marian the site wouldn't be too surprised. The stag wasn't quite as laid back about the fancy dress, but he didn't have a choice in the matter and when we arrived it gave everybody a good laugh.
After we'd completed a short safety briefing it was straight down to action, and we were shown how to handle the bows and take out different targets. Even though some of the lads lack any form of coordination we got the hang of things pretty quickly, and once we'd mastered the basics we played a couple of 'friendly' games to see how good we really were. To say we were new to archery experiences I think we handled ourselves pretty well, and some of the lads were surprisingly good!
The best part of our archery experience came right at the end of our session, and to finish we took part in a scored competition. Things got pretty competitive during the supposedly friendly games, so you can imagine how heated things got when it came to the scored rounds. We basically had to rack up as many points as possible with a set amount of arrows, and with the bragging rights on the line things got very serious.
Even though I didn't manage to take top spot I got a pretty respectable score, which is more than can be said for Maid Marian! The lads loved it though, and all the banter set us up perfectly for our night out. We'll definitely be trying an archery experience again.
