One of the highlights of our Estonia trip is always the adventure park at Otepää. The coronavirus situation means that we get no trip to our friends and family in Estonia, so no visit to Otepää either.

I found two adventure parks similar to Otepää near Stockholm, and today we tried out the first of them – Accropark at Lida.

Eric unfortunately still had a sore back from our Gotland trip – too much sitting in the car and too many nights in on the wrong mattresses – so he couldn’t join us up in the trees.

I couldn’t help comparing Accropark to the park at Otepää.

Much of it was very similar. There are obstacle courses/climbing trails up in the pine trees that you follow from platform to platform, while a carabiner hooked onto a cable keeps you safe at all times. The obstacles can be anything – plank walkways, nets, wobbly assemblies of logs and cable, etc. There are courses of various difficulties, ranging from “good for kids” to “requires real physical exertion”.

At Otepää, a ticket allows you to climb each trail once. Accropark tickets are timed and you can climb as much as you want during your two-hour slot. This is nice in theory, because you can skip the basic courses and do your favourite harder courses several times. But they sell too many tickets to each slot. There was a lot of waiting in queues at each course start and at the platforms.

The park at Lida was crammed into a much smaller area. The courses criss-crossed each other and the ground area felt nearly cramped. I found it a bit difficult to navigate. It was fine as long as we strictly followed the difficulty order, because the start of the next course was always close to the end of the previous one. But finding the start of, say, the “Blue+” course among all the stuff was not very easy.

The courses themselves also felt smaller, although I’m not sure how much that was actually the case and how much was my subjective experience due to the denser arrangement. I think the courses probably had roughly the same number of obstacles, but many individual sections/obstacles were shorter than I had become used to. This plus all the queueing meant that I got less climbing and more waiting than I had expected.

Accropark had a really clever security solution on their courses. The harnesses at Otepää have two carabiners that you move from cable to cable, one at a time, so you’re always attached by at least one. The harnesses at Accropark have one normal carabiner that you move yourself, and one red that is permanently attached to the cable that you simply cannot remove. Getting it from one cable section to the next one took a bit of practice, but was quite convenient once I got the hang of it. Adrian and Ingrid are experienced climbers by now and wouldn’t forget to clip on, but when they were beginners, this solution would have removed one big worry for me.

There was one real disappointment for me at Accropark, and that was the zipline rides. They were just plain uncomfortable. The harness I got had me hanging so high up that the zipline cable was level with my eyes. I was constantly thinking about how to keep my head away from the cable (and failed once when I got spun around and the cable chafed the back of my head). I don’t know if the harness was badly designed or if I got the wrong size or something.

Several of the short rides between platforms also ended with really hard stops with a strong yank to the harness and nothing to soften the braking. Actually painful. The long zipline rides across the valley at Otepää are the best part of the park; here I didn’t even try the pure zipline courses because my experience on the short ones sucked so badly.

Ingrid and Adrian were both happy with the park and would be glad to go there again. Ingrid managed all the courses including the hardest “Red+” (although that one was a real challenge for her). Adrian did everything except that Red+.

I think we’ll try the other park at Vaxholm next time.

Bonus memory from Lida: the countless cute rabbits nibbling on the grass everywhere, including babies looking no bigger than my hand.