SkyDiving

On Friday night, my roommate Elaina and I decided that we were going to go skydiving. Originally the plan was for Saturday, but plans had been forgotten and we decided to go on Monday instead. As luck would have it, our other roommate Lynn could join us as well. So, around 12:45, we loaded up the car and went for a 50-minute ride up to Pepperell, MA to the SkyJump airport. There was a lot of waiting… it was a bunch of hippies running the place. We were told to expect to be there about 2 hours. That was a lie. We were sitting around waiting for about 2.5 hours and then we finally got to suit up in some really sexy Dickies coveralls.


We were paired up with a tandem instructor that we were attached to throughout the jump. I was paired up with a guy named Dave. He helped me put on my harness and showed me what to do as soon as we got out of the airplane and how to land properly without getting hurt.



I think that I was the only one who wasn’t nervous out of the three of us. I was stoked (as you can see by the goofy grin on my face)! I will admit that there was a moment of “oh crap, I can’t believe I’m doing this… too late to turn back now!!” as we stood at the door of the plane about to jump. No lie. BUT, as soon as we started falling, there was no time to think about it.


There was a little glitch with our parachute, which kept us from jumping at 10,000 feet, and there was a crowd, so we had to wait until 13,000 feet. This translates into about a full minute of free fall instead of 40 seconds. Dave mentioned that the free-fall felt like forever… and it did feel long. We did some 360’s to get a really good view, although the clouds got in the way of the Boston skyline.

At 5,000 feet, Dave gave me the signal and I pulled the chute (but his hand was there to pull it in case I didn’t make it). At that point, I experienced the most peaceful feeling in the world. It was unbelievable. Seriously. I even got to control the parachute for a bit while we were up in the sky (but I was much more comfortable letting him control this instead of me).


We landed and then it was over. But I am SOO glad I did it. So glad! I hope to do it again sometime!