So I've finally managed to get another resolution ticked off, which is just as well, as the year is quickly drawing to a close! This task saw me heading to the exotic climes of South Wales, to walk up Pen y Fan: the highest peak south of Snowdonia.

OK, so it wasn't exactly Everest, but give me a break, I'd never gone up a mountain before.

Following Duncan and Ruth's wedding in Cardiff, a few friends had decided to take the opportunity to hope across to Brecon for a walking holiday. Knowing that one of my resolutions this year was to climb a mountain, they kindly invited me along. So nursing moderate (and in one case, severe) hangovers, five of us left Cardiff for a 5 day walking holiday. The group consisted of Martin & Tanya (who'd also been on this year's 10k run), Luke and Steve. Four fairly experienced walkers. And myself, who hadn't been in years.

And what an eventful five days it was! Even before we'd arrived, I'd achieved a personal first. I was involved in my first ever…car accident!

We took a bit of a wrong turn trying to find the cottage where we were staying and ended up on a dirt track leading up to someone's house. Martin expertly performed a seven-point turn (he says he meant for it to be that many), and we started back to the main road. When all of a sudden, BANG! We veered to the left and found ourselves teetering on the edge of the road above a stream, like something out of the Sweded version of The Italian Job:

Martin's the one on the left, hiding his face in shame. At this point, I was sat in the driver's seat trying to weigh the car down so it didn't go over the edge. Everyone else was behind the camera, uploading pictures to Facebook.

Three shots at getting out later, including wrecking the tow hook on Martin's Micra, we enlisted the services of a guy with a 7.5 ton tow truck. A tow truck that moved more than the car did on the first attempt at pulling it out. It was stuck that bad. Well done, Martin.

Still, we got the car out eventually and to a local garage for an assessment, so we could carry on with the holiday. The first day's walking was my first all-day recreational walk since primary school, and was something of a baptism of fire for me. Well, I say fire, it was more like torrential rain.

The day started out quite pleasant, but just after lunch it started drizzling a bit. This turned to light rain as we went uphill…turning into a pretty continuous pelting of sideways rain and wind that chose to pick up to the standing-up-becomes-hard level on the Beaufort Scale just as we reached the narrowest point of a ridge a lovely sharp drop on one side.

Suffice to say that after a few hours in the rain we were all more than a little damp.

The next day we took it a bit easier, with a bit of a wander by a canal and a visit to Abergavenny Castle. It was threatening rain again, and we didn't want to repeat the previous day's drenching. Especially not wearing plastic bags in still-damp boots.

The third day was mountain day! We headed up Cribyn first, which left us with a short walk down and back up again to the top of Pen y Fan, our 886m high goal. The view atop Cribyn was pretty impressive.

It was at this point, I discovered something interesting about myself. It turns out I suffer from vertigo. This wasn't a problem going up, as I didn't have to look down to see where I was going.

So I find myself On the way down between Cribyn and Pen y Fan Gingerly putting one foot in front of the other in the hope my foothold wouldn't give way below me. So let's just say I arrived at the bottom of the slope a good ten minutes after everyone else. There's something about being passed by pensioners that can rob a guy of his self respect.

To add insult to injury, we found that some guy had managed to get a quad bike up there.

So it couldn't have been that hard to get up. Still, I pushed through and managed it in the end.

So despite the the car accident, the rain and the height-related panic, I managed to climb a mountain! And that's kind of the point of these goals: to experience something once, and then I don't have to do it again.

And as seemed to be the custom in Wales, it started raining again after lunch.