Here is the commentary on my skydiving jump, if anyone is interested. Many folks here have already seen this, but I thought I'd share for those who hadn't. And if you don't care, then just delete.
http://youtu.be/dzr2rENGGc4 Skydiving is something I've wanted to do my whole life. Since I was turning 40, I figured now was a good time to scratch this off the bucket list! My wonderful wife was kind enough to arrange this for my birthday! Thank you, Gena! We went with Skydive Jacksonville. Several of my family members were there to help celebrate the occasion (or collect my remains if it went horribly wrong): my wife, daughter, step-son, father, step-mother, sister, and brother-in-law. It was so nice of them to travel just to see me jump! I wore my Superman t-shirt for the occasion. I considered wearing my Firestorm shirt, but if you are flying you gotta go with Superman, right? I did carry a small Firestorm action figure (the Action Heroes Brightest Day Firestorm), just so I could say Firestorm made the jump with me. :) I tandem-jumped with a great guy named Kevin. Kevin was so pumped and energetic; you'd never guess he'd already skydived nearly 3,000 times! His son also jumped with us. It was fun to be there with father and son jumping at the same time. I thought I'd be nervous before the jump, but I wasn't at all. I felt super-charged and really excited! I was amazed the plane ride was so smooth. Normally when I fly my stomach momentarily drops during take-off, but this was smooth as could be. Probably the smoothest airplane ride I've ever had! The plane took us up to 12,500 feet (a little over 2 miles up in the air)! You could see all of Jacksonville, even the coast in the hazy distance. As we opened the door of the plane and prepared to jump, I only felt excitement - no fear! We jumped and free-falled (free-fell?) for about 7,000 feet over the course of 45 seconds. If I've done my sums correctly, that means we were falling at over 100 miles an hour! Surprisingly, the jump wasn't scary at all! It was very smooth and the pressure of the wind made me feel supported instead of out-of-control. I did a few Superman flying poses, c'mon, you should have expected that. It was very, very loud and I could barely hear myself cheering. Then the parachute was deployed; also much smoother than I expected. It suddenly became very quiet and Kevin and I could talk in nearly normal voices. It was absolutely breath-taking up there! The video and pictures don't do it justice. We sailed the remaining distance over about five minutes, doing some fun spirals and spins! For the landing, we came in fairly slow over the field we started from and slide to a halt on our bottoms. Now I will admit I hit the ground at just the wrong angle and bumped my tailbone pretty hard. It's still sore (5 days later), but it's slowly getting better. That was the ONLY downside to the jump! I had an absolute blast and look forward to jumping again! A fantastic way to celebrate my 40th birthday! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Unique Geek" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/theuniquegeek?hl=en.
