Today, I went skydiving. I jumped (well kinda fell) out of a plane at 14,000ft in the air!

I had been planning on doing this for about a week, the goal was to do it on my birthday but it was too windy. On our third go we finally got to do it. I am somewhat afraid of heights so over the past couple of days I have been trying not to process what I was about to do. When we get to Redcliff, where we are going to do the jump, Maria and I are there for approximately three minutes and they have us in harnesses explaining put your body like a banana, hands on harness until I tap your shoulder and then hands above your head, five minutes later they have us in a plane. I don’t even think if finally sunk in what we were about to do until we were leaving the ground.

The flight up was really something interesting, at about 3,000ft all I could think was that I was going to die, for some reason at about 7,000ft the feeling leveled out and I was excited again. There was a video but I couldn’t really warrant spending $100 on it. I was smiling until I essentially fell/jumped with dude out of the plane. Then there was an elaborate stream of curse words. Fortunately in free fall you can’t hear anything, so I didn’t offend the guy that was keeping me alive. I would explain that minute of free fall as the longest minute of my life, crazy invigorating, but horrifying at the same time.

Once the parachute was opened he let me hold the handles and steer for a while, very cool. We did all kinds of spins, got to see a lot of landscape, and showed me the cross on the beach where we would land (he did the steering to land). It is kind of surreal that I even did that today, it was such a rush I can’t fully comprehend it. Great way to start off my 26th year… even if it is five days later.