Skydiving!

Before she left for Hungary, James promised Liza he'd take her skydiving when she got back. Something about you have to be 18 to be able to sign your life away before they'll let you get in their airplanes. . .

Samuel has the same deal waiting for him to turn 18. Tori and Miriam agreed with their great-grandfather's opinion that "there is no reason to jump out of a perfectly good airplane". James's standard reply to that is, "Who says the airplane is perfectly good? It has a big hole in the side", and that's just for starters.

After much juggling of Liza's busy summer schedule, the big day was scheduled for Saturday, August 4th. I chose not to jump, both holding to that family philosophy, and not being sure how my body would handle the adrenalin. I'm doing so much better than I was two or four years ago, and don't have the adrenalin surges I used to have when the Lyme disease was active, but still. . . 14,000 feet is a long way to fall, and adrenalin is a natural response to the situation.

Tori spent the night so she could go with us, and we all piled in the car at some early hour of the morning for the two hour drive to Orange, VA. James and Liza filled out their paperwork. . .















took a training class on solid ground. . .






and we waited around for a couple of hours.







The tandem team from the Army skydiving team, the Golden Knights, was there taking bigwigs for jumps, and we had fun visiting with them while we waited. It's quite an opportunity for Liza to say she got to jump with the Golden Knights! (And she did-two of them went up in the plane at the same time she did.)

By the time we'd hung out there for four hours, I was really wishing I had signed up to jump also. I'll probably be jumping when Samuel does.

Here's a picture of Liza back on terra firma. . .
Both James and Liza were thrilled with the experience. They both told me I have to do it with them the next time. We highly recommend the Skydive Orange experience to anyone who wants to try it out. I'll try to get Liza to upload her jump video, and will add the link when she does.