Eighteen Months Old

Mommy and Daddy went skydiving. I got to watch with my cousin.
Here's an excerpt from mommy.... "I had always wanted to try a skydive. So last weekend Dave and I signed up for a tandem skydive (not tied to each other) and drove out to a place off of 290 called Skydive Houston. The weather was beautiful....sunny, high of 80, and winds about 8 to 10. I wasn't really nervous about going up. The only part that made me a little discomforted was watching the person in front of me just step out and ...disappear. It's like they are just sucked out of the plane. We are strapped onto our tandem instructor who does all the hard work for us. The plane ride took us up to about 13,500 feet. When we got up to the door he tells me to lift my feet, arch my back, and lay my head back at his shoulder, and then whoosh we are freefalling. After you get over the initial tummy drop, then the shear pressure of the fall, being so high up and the wind buffeting up against you kind of takes your breath away (I thought). It only took us 60 seconds (at 120 miles an hour) to drop from 13,500 to 6000 feet. Once we reached 6000 feet then the parachute was pulled (and opened, yeah!) and it becomes a much more peaceful ride. I got an added bonus of going through a cloud right before we opened the parachute. I always wondered what it's like to fly through the clouds when I'm in the plane and now I know (cooler, a little wet, and made me seem a little lighter). Anyway, for the rest of the ride I did a lot of sightseeing. It's like standing on the edge of a tall skyscaper and not having to worry about falling off. They treated us to a couple of 360 degree turns in both directions, which most closely reminded me of a turn in a helicopter (very tight turn that kind of makes your tummy drop). Then we circled around and came in for a landing. Ended up that I jumped out of the plane first, but Dave made it down to the ground before me. My landing was quite smooth. Since we had a little wind as we came in, we flared up at the last minute and walked onto the field."

The end of October, we went to Albuquerque to see my aunt and uncle. The scenery picture is from Sandia Peak tram ride.

The End

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