A video of my, and 4 of my friends', tandem skydiving adventure! I remixed our individual tapes into one video.
So we decided to go skydiving/parachuting! The closest (or rather, best known) drop zone to Washington, D.C. is Skydive Orange, located in Orange County, Virginia. From Fairfax / Northern Virginia, it's about a 1.75 hour drive. We reserved noon as our time to arrive so I expected to take the class and that we'd jump by 2 PM, tops. We arrived at noon, signed our lives away on their legal waivers, took a short 10 MINUTE class on how we would jump tandem, and then waited until 7:30 PM to jump!
/RANT
That was not a typo. We did not jump for seven and a half hours after our arrival. And this place is out in the sticks so there was nothing to do there. Literally. There were some wheeled carts laying around, so we rolled around the pavement like idiots for seven-odd hours, while the other people waiting sat and laughed at our antics.
It was especially aggravating because several people who came with, or after us, went and jumped before us. They were also tandem jumpers, so I didn't understand why we were put so far back in the schedule. We repeatedly asked the front desk when we might jump, or if we could just get an idea of our jump window so we could drive around and maybe get some food, but we were just told curtly each time that we would know when to jump when we saw our names on the whiteboard. Keep in mind that the jump was a healthy $255 - I'm not expecting the world, but just a little consideration of our situation would have been appreciated.
In any case, we ended up jumping just around sunset. It was gorgeous and nearly made me forget the wait of the previous seven hours. However, my pictures, which cost $125, all came out black. If we had gone earlier, when there was sunlight, my pictures would have come out much better. Actually, my friends got great pictures - it was just that my photographer messed up some settings on his camera so they just all came out bad. So the pictures I have posted here are either taken from my friends, who had decent photographers, or heavily edited versions of my severely-underexposed pictures. My skydving video, however, came out pretty nice.
To be fair, I wrote an email to Skydive Orange with a complaint about the wait and the uselessness of my photo package, and a request of at least a partial refund on the pictures, and they wrote back apologizing for the long wait, and offered a refund on my photos.
/The Jump
But the jump was so fantastic! Here are my observations on how it felt to go skydiving, and some pictures of us skydiving.
We went up in a twin-engine plane, and halfway up, the instructor strapped me into his harness, as he was the one wearing the parachute. In the plane we were squeezed in with 21 other people like sardines. There were some solo jumpers who sat up front and they jumped at around 8,000 feet - watching them jump and perform flips in the air made all of us even more excited about our own upcoming jumps.
We went up to 13,500 feet (about 2.5 miles in the air) when one of the instructors opened the bay door. I was the first one on the bench so my instructor stood up and started inching me toward the open door, and when I reached it, he began a count:
1. leaned me out slightly
2. leaned back in
3. vaulted out
It's was not a slow three-second count; all three counts occured within a single second!
I've been told, and have read on other websites about skydiving experiences, when asked "how does it feel to go skydiving?", that it would feel like a cushion of air when I first left the plane. Not quite! The sensation was that of falling at full speed, like a rock, and it was just the craziest feeling because the idea of jumping out of a speeding plane is so counter-intuitive. When you jump, you're falling fast, and you know it! The sensation was like nothing I could have imagined.
They also told us that in the first few seconds out of the plane we would need to take deep breaths, but it was really hard to breathe. The air was cold and was just rushing by, and in those first few seconds, I honestly felt as though I had forgotten how to breathe, and that my heart had stopped beating. The feeling was so exhilarating, of being completely disconnected from the world, of having nothing to hold on to, and nothing to hold on to me.
I wanted to scream at first, but I couldn't at first - nobody did! At least not until 15 seconds or so into the jump when I finally started taking "normal" breaths, and finally realized what was happening! Then I just let it all out and started screaming at the top of my lungs, only I couldn't even hear myself over the rushing wind around me.
Just under a minute went by when the chute opened up. I've read that you don't actually move up when this happens, but in any case, I felt like I was being pulled up by like god or something, or maybe the feeling of a rock that has just fallen from the sky and has smashed into a pool of water.
We then floated for about 4 minutes. The instructor pulled on his parachute a few times, making us speed from side to side. Again, being suspended in the air just gliding down, experiencing the sunset from a mile in the sky was just indescribable. It was serene and I felt so at peace with everything.
The landing was surprisingly soft. We were still moving very fast as we approached the ground, and we started moving much more horizontally than before. The grass continued zipping past us, and finally the instructor landed - tandem skydivers stick their feet out forward at this point, so I ended up landing by sitting on the grass. It was all very gentle and not at all what I had imagined.
Although I'm a little bit leery about going to Skydive Orange again, I would definitely go skydiving again. If the price weren't so high, I'd proabably go do it every weekend. It was just so liberating to be disconnected from the world, even if only for 5 minutes.
Total Cost: $255 (tandem jump) + $125 (picture/video package) = $380.00 for 5 minutes of total liberation
