If your friend group is like mine, on the weekends and over summer you all end up at one persons house sitting on your phones and doing nothing. Over this past summer, my friends and I got bored of this routine and wanted to fix things.

One of the first things we did was adventure to Collinsville. Filled with little shops and restaurants, this little part of Canton doesn’t seem like much of an adventure, but once you jump into the river, there’s so much more you can do.

The first thing we did was the rope swing which is fun but not too crazy. After that, we had to swim to the pillars. The pillars are 12 foot high platforms in the middle of the water. We usually jump off of them and flip into the water.

Though the pillars are really fun, my favorite thing to do in Collinsville is the bridge. This bridge is 50 feet high and really scary at first, but once you jump off, it is amazing. On my first time, it took me 45 minutes to force myself to jump off, but the next time I came back, I voluntarily jumped off 6 times.

On the day where I first jumped it, A local daredevil, Danny Cotton, climbed up to the top of the bridge, which is 70 feet high and extremely dangerous, and did a gainer back flip off of it into the water. We took videos of it and it was so crazy that they made ESPN (https://m.facebook.com/cullen.mchale/posts/10208296844917387?notif_t=like_tagged¬if_id=1467831011512296) . It was day that really evoked the adventurous craze within my friend group.

Pretty much everyone in West Hartford knows about and has gone to Heublien Tower, but after a couple hikes, this gets boring and you want something different to do. My friends and I found this out and decided to explore some more around the mountain. We ended up finding “king Phillips Cave”. This is a cave 40 feet up from the path level and extremely hard to get up to. There is also a mini cave on the way to King Phillips Cave that is easy to get to. Just be safe while exploring.

One of my favorite places to go is the old abandoned highway on I-84, It is a 3 level stack of graffiti covered highway and its just cool to walk around on. It took us a while to find how to get onto it but we eventually figured it out (park on Maple Ridge road in Farmington). Sometimes we take skateboards there and follow the road all the way down to where it stops. Its a cool unique spot that is fun to go to.

After we do these explorations a couple of times they can get a mundane so were always looking for more cool stuff to do. One way we find these places is http://www.abandonedct.com/?m=1. This website shows you a ton of abandoned places and cool places to go in Connecticut, and how to get there

My friend group had a pretty eventful summer and we always take a camera everywhere so we have a ton of footage for a summer edit. I posted it on Youtube and it is here for you to watch  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2oGmrKNZQE