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Today brought the daredevil feat that was SKYDIVING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We were both pretty giddy considering it was 6am this morning, an early start for us, but we leapt out of bed and ran down to the pickup at 7am from outside the skydiving shop. We had to fill in a load of paperwork (basically excluding the company from potential suing in case of death) and Claire got quite petrified upon reading, more than once 'Skydiving is a dangerous activity where people do and often die.' Thanks for that. We weren't put off though, and met our fellow jumpers, Michael, a dude from London, and Ted Tan (real name) from Malaysia, who laughed at whatever you said, regardless of whether it was funny or not, and who seemed to be a very jolly chap. We were all shaking in our boots, but hopped into the bus voluntarily, and were subjected to watching a video of a guy who jumped not once, not twice, but three times. We all laughed at watching his face distort, even though we knew that would be us in an hour or so's time.
We arrived at the launch site in the middle of nowhere, just as it was starting to get cloudy. We could see two pathetically small looking planes on the track, pretty much minis with wings to be honest. We all booked ourselves in and paid the remaining balance of our flights - during which time we all read the sign which said - "No refunds on refusals." No going back then! We also opted to get both a video and photos of our flight - expensive, but thoroughly worth it for memories we would treasure forever.
Our names were soon called, Liam was flying with a guy called Ray who'd jumped over 12,000 times, and Claire's instructor was called Craig, similarly experienced with over 11,000 jumps - so we were in experienced hands. We were then made to don sexy jumpsuit stylee attire, and cosy harnesses (too cosy for one of us, no prizes for guessing who) to keep us from freefalling along, and we were jumping into the plane before we really had much chance to change our minds!
The whole way up we were being filmed - which was not very flattering since we were both scared silly. Claire felt like she was going to through up the entire way up, and Liam just kept laughing to himself. As if we were just about to throw ourselves out of a plane. We watched a guy yell 'to infinity and beyond,' before running out of the back into the open sky at 5,000ft, then we continued upwards to around 14,000ft. The green light went on, then before we knew it we were strapped to our instructor's fronts, and heading towards the open door.
All we could see were the clouds. Breathing heavily and trying not to throw up, Claire was the first to fall, followed quickly by Liam. And as soon as our feet left the plane, our fear disappeared, taken over by just the sheer sense of space we were tumbling through, and the wind rushing past our ears. INCREDIBLE! We were falling at over 200 kph, but it didn't feel like it - just the sensation of pressure from the wind on our faces. Needless to say, we looked dead attractive. No need for botox! What seemed like seconds later (but was really a minute) our parachutes opened and we were tugged into slowly down. That was probably the worst part - Liam felt really queasy on the flight down from there, particularly when our instructors steered us sharply to the left and right. "Do you like rollercoasters?" they said, before waiting for an answer.
Altogether, the experience lasted about 10 minutes. We hit the ground gently on our bums, then kissed the ground and removed our harnesses. We wanted to do it all again!
Nothing can top that - nothing. It was the most petrified we've ever been in our lives, but the minute we started falling our fear fell too and we just enjoyed it. The videos are better than the photos too, so just you wait til you see that :)
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