By Jiminy!

What a cracking day out! We were invited to join some of the Girl's friends at Jiminy Peak, just over the Massachusetts border. It's a ski resort all winter, but in summer transforms into a mountainside amusement park.

Rather a good one at that - not too many attractions, but all of them challenging in one way or another. There's the spiderweb - cimb up through layers of mesh and descend by an inflatable slide; a rope-walk obstacle course; climbing wall; harnessed trampoline bouncing; an alpine slide - a sort of bobsled run reached via a chairlift; and the only mountain-rollercoaster in the eastern United States.

I was concerned that my kids, who had found some of the rides at Hoffman's Playland daunting, wouldn't get much out of the whole experience. How wrong I was! The real wuss of the family was well and truly exposed today - but I did manage the alpine slide once, and the mountain-coaster twice (at the Boy's insistence - he was whooping all the way down and shouting 'This is GREAT!!!!' as I grimaced behind him in our shared 'sled'). Girl and Boy were up and down the spiderweb and bombing down the mountainside as often as we would let them.

Also in Jiminy Peak's favour: the setting is lovely, it's very uncommercial, there were hardly any queues, and all the rides are powered by wind-turbine - so it's eco-friendly too.