While most of you probably engaged in nothing more taxing than an Easter Egg hunt this weekend, the Shans decided to take a quick little trip to Vampire Mountain, to deliver a bag full of chocolate eggs to the gang in the caves. (Vancha is especially fond of chocolate Easter bunnies, so we took a few of those for him too.)

You can see me scaling part of the mountain with Dante and Gaia in the first photo. Dante rests up in a lean-to shelter in the second. I help Gaia climb over a tree trunk in the third. And the fourth captures us when we made it back home and caught forty winks after our very tiring trip.

Now, sceptics among you might point to the fact that these photos look suspiciously like they were taken in our local forest park, Curraghchase, and we didn't go anywhere at all exotic this weekend. But nope, they were definitely taken on the way to Vampire Mountain. Scout's honour!!!

:-) :-) :-) :-)

You don't need to travel all the way to Vampire Mountain to check out the Aprile issue of my monthly newsletter, which features a cool little competition this month, along with all the latest news stories. Just click here: https://darrenshan.com/news/shanville-monthly