Skydiving!

Yesterday, a group of 8 went skydiving. We got picked up at campus at 1:30 and headed to Salgareda. The driver turned out to be one of the pilots, and also an Italian police man. I do think we had a greater chance of dying in the car ride, because he as a CRAZY driver! Literally the ride there was more scary than the jump!

So they split us up 2 people went first, then the next 3 then there were 3 of us left and all of a sudden my tandem guy says lets go! I was expecting to be with my friends, but they had different plans! I went up in this itty bitty plane with like 10 italians, and I had no idea what they were saying. Luckily, my guy spoke enough english to explain to me what was going on.

The plane kept climbing and climbing. You could see the jumpers altitude meters slowly climbing higher. At one point, my tandem guy pointed out the Adriatic sea and Venice. You could see water off in one direction and the mountains in the other direction; it was soo pretty!! i wasn't nervous at all (which surprised me a little). At 15,000 ft they open the door and he swings me out of the plane and he's sitting on the edge of the plane and i'm just hanging off of him that was my only OH SHIT moment. Then we jump/he pushes us away from the plane. He makes us do a couple barrel rolls, before leveling off and having us fall straight with our bellies down. It doesn't really feel like you are falling. It feels like you are shooting forward except for the fact the ground is getting closer. Its the closest you can come to flying! We free fell like that for a minute, but it didn't seem that long.

Then he pulled the chute. All of a sudden everything got quiet, the wind wasn't pounding against my face anymore, and I just started laughing like crazy. He let me steer the parachute, but I wasn't crazy enough, so he'd pull even harder and we'd just cork screw one direction then the other. When we finally got to the ground, I definitely put my legs down too quick and caused us to fall on landing, but we weren't hurt! It was AMAZING!!!

All in all, I fell 15,000 ft going 125 mph and survived to tell about it!! And I can not wait to go again!! I'll post pictures as soon as I can steal them from my friends! I just had to tell you all about it!!

<3