Skydiving

If you're like me, flying with a parachute is a lovely idea. And you'd gladly dump out of a plane with nothing but the parachute strapped to your back. Just as long as the plane is on fire, exploding, or otherwise severely incapacitated and incapable of making a safe landing. I'll be the first one out. But at the same time, I feel absolutely no urge to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

For my birthday this year Sarah got me a gift certificate to an indoor skydiving facility. It's a wind tunnel that's been stood up, so the floor is just blowing a lot of wind at you. The exact speed varies (they set it for you -- you can see mine was set at ~102mph on the screen at the lower left of the video), based on your weight and experience. Some of the best fliers can literally sit in mid-air, in an upright sitting position. They then flatten themselves, shoot up to the ceiling, then freefall back down and just catch themselves. Me? Not quite that good. It was incredibly fun, though surprisingly tiring. Here's a video, and you can see the other video and a bunch of photos in the gallery.