Skydiving!

Mary and I took Eliza to skydive yesterday. Now that she is 18, she can sign away her life and JUMP! We drove down to Skydive Orange. We got there at about 9 am, and signed in, went through the simple ground training and then Eliza and I filled out the long legal paperwork. Mary convinced me to take another skydive at the same time. We turned in out paperwork and then had to wait. We signed up for the tandem skydive.
While we were there, we noticed that the U.S. Army Golden Knights were at the dropzone, practicing and having a relaxing day of skydiving. One of the Golden Knights is an amputee, who lost his leg above the knee. He is still on active duty, working for the Army, and oh, darn they pay him to skydive!
We got into the airplane at about 12, and flew up to about 14,500 feet! The plane carried 20 sky divers on our trip, and Eliza had a blast! She had another skydiver taking video of her jump so that she will be able to prove that she did it! Anyway, I got to watch her make her jump and then my jumpmaster (Mike) and I headed for the door and followed Eliza and her crew out. What a ride! As I moved to the door, I thought to myself, "I'm really doing this again!" That was jump 18 for me.
As we were falling, I got to watch Eliza as she was skydiving, as well as that fantastic view of the world coming up to meet us. And, as always, the skydive is too short, and we opened our 'chute at 6000 feet. We had a nice long ride down. While we were flying, we flew our chute close to Eliza's and waved and smiled and hooted at each other. Then we flew away from each other and got to play with the wind! Mike (the jumpmaster) got us spinning around really fast and turning this way and that. Lots of wild fun. As we were flying back toward the dropzone, we watched Eliza and her jumpmaster land, and then we did a few more of those spins and s-turns and then we were down. I really love that feeling of flying!

Eliza said that it was great and fantastic.

I can now brag at work that I jumped with the Golden Knights! Oh, and Eliza can brag about that too!