When my best friend of nearly 20 years asked me to be her Chief Bridesmaid I was over the moon, until I realised that meant I would be in charge of organising the hen party!
The hen party was for 32 of the brides closest friends and family members, and with such a big group of girls to keep happy I knew how important picking the perfect activity was. After speaking to some of the other girls I decided to go for something a little bit different. I wanted to squeeze as much fun as possible into the day before we headed out on our girls' night out. So I decided to ditch the spas and pampering days and booked an afternoon paintball experience, which I don't think anyone saw coming, but why should the blokes have all the fun?
As you can probably imagine the majority of us had never been paintballing before, so this was our first real paintball experience. I wasn't sure what to expect, and because the group was so mixed I was worried paintball might be a bit too physical for some of the 'maturer' ladies. As it turned out I couldn't have been more wrong, the mums and aunties involved were probably the most deadly with a paintball gun.
After meeting the rest of the hens at the paintball site we signed in and got changed into our paintball overalls/onesies, which are just as stylish as they sound! Once we'd all got changed we sat down for a briefing which covered all the rules, and gave us a bit more information about what our paintball experience would be like. By the time it came to getting our paintball guns and ammo the nerves had definitely disappeared, and we were all just really excited to get down to action.
Because there were so many of us we got one of the paintball zones to ourselves, which was better because it meant we didn't have to play against anybody who knew what they were doing. We were all complete newbies but the instructor took that into account and started our paintball experience with a couple of easier games to break us in gently. We quickly got into the swing of things though, and we even played a couple of games that were designed to give the bride some special VIP treatment.
In total we probably played 4 or 5 different games and by the time our paintball experience came to an end we were all running round the woods like pros.. well not quite but I'd have fancied our chances against any stag group!
A paintball experience probably isn't first choice for a lot of hens but if you're after a laugh I'd definitely recommend it, and it doesn't hurt anywhere near as much as I’d imagined. The whole hen party loved it, and even though we ganged up on the bride at the end of the day she loved it just as much as the rest of us.
