In August of 2008, Tom told me that he wanted to go skydiving for his 52nd birthday. It sounded exciting and fun.
I had considered skydiving when I was eighteen years old, but I was told at the time that I would need to get a parents permission and my dad flat out said “NO.” After that I didn’t really give it much thought until Tom mentioned that it might be a fun thing for us to do together. I agreed and we decided to invite some of our friends to go with us. We had one taker, Randi, who was available and wanted to do the dive with us.
When we mentioned this to Tom’s brother, Mark, he decided to come to Las Vegas for the weekend and be our personal photographer. We booked our dive for Saturday, August 16th at 8 AM. This gave me two weeks to research skydiving and watch scary You Tube videos of others jumping out of planes screaming at the top of their lungs.
On the day of our jump, we got up early, picked up Randi and headed to Boulder City where SkyDive Las Vegas is located. After some preliminary paperwork we were escorted into a small room where we watched a video giving us our instructions. It seemed fairly simple since we were going tandem and would have instructors strapped to our backs. Our next step was to meet our instructor and get into our jumpsuits and gear.
About 16 of us boarded a small plane and took off for the sky. We were sitting across from our instructors as we climbed to 15,000 feet. Our instructors then attached themselves to the back of us and we headed to the back of the plane, two at a time. It was only a matter of seconds from sitting in the open door to flying out of the plane. That was a little disappointing since I imagined that this would have been the scary part.
At this point, we were free falling towards the earth. This lasted for about a minute. It was very turbulent and I started to feel a little motion sickness. At this point the chute was opened and we spent the next 5 to 7 minutes floating towards the earth. This was very much like para sailing and I really loved this part. We could see for miles and some of the sights included Lake Mead, Hoover Dam, Valley of Fire, Colorado River, Lake Mohave, Red Rock Canyon, Mt. Charleston and the entire Las Vegas Strip. The view was unbelievable. We had an incredibly soft landing and I was happy to be down and alive and in one piece.
Would I do it again? No, I don’t think so. It really wasn’t as scary or as fun as I thought it was going to be. Was it the thrill of a lifetime, sure, one of them!
