Skydiving!

Tuesday, we did a couple small things on our list and then were trying to decide what to do for the rest of the day.  Cody mentioned skydiving, and I said that would be awesome, not thinking we would actually do it. But he replied with “Really??” and I thought, why not?

We looked it up on the computer and I started to get really anxious.  I knew that I was eventually going to do it, but I was pretty scared.

I gathered hold of myself (Cody was not even a little bit anxious) and we left. 

It was an hour drive to get there.  When we got there, it was this semi-ghetto place.

 

We sat down to fill out the waiver.  For the first time in my life, I was actually trying to read through the whole thing, but I couldn’t because they were rushing us so much.  We had gotten there about 5 minutes before a plane was going to leave and so they said that we could either go on that plane or wait another two hours or something to get on another one.  Of course we chose to leave right then, so we didn’t even watch a video.

The guy I was going to jump out with was from South Africa.  He told me (this was my training instead of the video) that as soon as I jumped out, I just needed to kick his butt as hard as I could and say “Banana banana banana” to keep my body in a good position for flying.

Cody’s guy was from England and he was tiny.

We told him that I would be living in London this summer, and he basically told me that since I don’t drink beer, I wasn’t going to have any fun there.

This other guy kept following me around.  I couldn’t figure out why he kept talking to me until he mentioned something about pictures.  I had decided not to buy pictures even though it made me sad not to do it, and I looked at Cody and he had gotten pictures for me!!!  What a great guy.  I was really excited.

The plane was suuuper ghetto.  I felt like it barely made it off the ground.  Cody told me that as soon as he got on the plane, he was thinking of how he could land the plane (he has been taking flying lessons) and then he realized that if something went wrong, we could all just jump out since we had parachutes. 

I was getting really anxious again leaving the ground.  My jumper could tell and told me some really stupid jokes to keep me distracted and I just decided that I was being a baby and made myself overcome it.  From that point on, I was never really anxious again.

I think we got to 13,000 feet.  But I could be wrong.  Waddling over to the exit was pretty funny.  Both Cody and I wanted to do flips out of the plane.  I kept asking my guy, and he kept saying “We’re going to have a really good time.”  Cody went first and apparently he did like 10 flips straight out of the plane. 

When we finally jumped, it was scary for about 1.6 seconds.  That’s the only time (besides opening the chute) that you actually feel like you’re falling.  The rest of the time it’s just windy.

We didn’t do any flips.  Later I learned that they really aren’t allowed to do flips so since I had the camera on me, he wouldn’t do it with me.  The hard thing about it being so windy was that it was hard to breathe.  Especially since they kept making me look up at the camera.

But here is the funniest picture from the whole thing.  Cody almost died laughing when he saw it.  We all did.  It’s the skydiving picture that everyone has but no one shows because it’s so bad.  Or at least I hope other people looked like this and it wasn’t just me…

Hahahahaha. 

Landing.

We both loved it.  It was really fun and really exciting.  It was fun to ride around in the parachute because they let us drive it.  Cody’s guy had him hold one of the handles as low as he could and then the guy held the other one as high as he could and they whipped around almost horizontal to the ground. 

 

I highly recommend skydiving!