Duo team up to offer Cracking Days Out
Oct 8 2007 by Andrew Mernin, The Journal
AFORMER care home owner and an ex-policeman would seem an unlikely duo to lead survival expeditions deep into the heart of the jungle or to the top of the highest mountains.
But Steve Berry and Rob Simpson, both originally from South Shields, are doing just that with their new business, Cracking Days Out.
The company leads expeditions to Bolivia and Morocco and runs wilderness survival, rock climbing and team-building events for schoolchildren and adults from Yorkshire to the Scottish Borders.
Mr Berry sold South Shields-based elderly care homes Bruce Lodge and St Gregory’s, which he ran with his wife, to help raise funds to launch the firm.
Mr Simpson served as an officer at Northumbria Police for 21 years followed by a seven year career in teaching before launching the business which is expected to turnover around £100,000 this year.
The company, which currently has the backing of two schools in the region, is hoping to sign deals with more North-East educational institutions and expects to extend its international reach to Spain, Mexico and Peru by summer 2008. It is also planning to take North-East schoolchildren to Bolivia in partnership with humanitarian charity Mission Bolivia to meet outlying communities in the third world country.
Meanwhile the firm plans to raise funds to develop its own activity centre in the North-East to support its work with educational and corporate clients.
Mr Berry said: “I set up the business when I came back from climbing Mount Everest. I do a lot of mountaineering and Rob has a lot of survival experience in the jungle so we decided to set up a company to work for ourselves. This was an opportunity to do something we enjoyed.” Mr Simpson, who has an official qualification in jungle survival through training he carried out in Indonesia, said: “The outdoors is quite inspiring and so we want to roll out more outdoor activities to schools to get children involved.”
Cracking Days Out is the latest in a string of adventure tourism businesses to surface in the region in recent years. Adventure travel firms in the region include North Shields-based Undiscovered Destinations which last August launched trips Angola in Africa. Northumberland-based Activities Abroad now offers dog-sled safaris in Lapland while Trekforce Worldwide, based in Wooler, Northumberland, runs gap-year expeditions to remote locations such as Belize in Central America and Papua New Guinea, South Pacific.
