Ziplines and Bungy Cords

You know how when you decide to have children, you wonder if they'll look more like you or your dearly beloved? And then you ooh and aaaw over the sweet and spectacular things s/he can do and how that is just like when you or dearly beloved were small?

And then you have those moments--where you KNOW you've been faithful. The child just HAS to belong to the both of you--I mean, he's YOUR child. How, then, to explain this (sorry for any resulting neck pain--I tilted the camera and can't change it around)?

This IS NO CHILD OF MINE. Or Mark's. He kept asking, "So, if you had to stand up there and someone put a gun to your head and said jump, what would you do?" And I said, "I'd say, 'Pull the trigger' because only by being dead would I go over the edge." Look closely. Can you see him shaking just a titchy bit? He was. He has a strange look on his face--a little tense. And he appears to be afraid to actually touch his certificate. Must some after-effect of terminal velocity, I don't know.

When we went back a few days later for go-karts, though, we watched a girl who just couldn't do it--until the guy just pushed her out. Cameron was full of sage advice: "You have to do your thinking on the ground. Once you're up there, you just have to jump. You can't think up there, you'll just psych yourself out." (He actually jumped so quickly that we barely got the camera up and running before he leaped.)

By far and away, though, the big highlight was the Flight of the Gibbon. It was awesome. As in cool. Spectacular. Amazing. Exciting. Fun. Exhilerating. Adventurous. You know, that sort of thing. Me, the woman who is too afraid of heights to stand on a chair. I zipped! I (We) zipped for 2 kilometers over 14 lines (the longest was 375 feet) about 150 feet off the ground. We had to rappel twice down to another level (and then down to the ground at the end). Most of the time, we were only 20-30 feet above the treetops and you couldn't see the ground. The last line and rappel was over open ground and that did give me the willies.


We zipped forward and backward. We zipped in pairs. We zipped alone. And a little guy kept an eye on us (a venomous eye, to be sure).

We did a lot of fun stuff, and agreed that most of it fell into the "been there, done that" category, if we ever returned. Not this one, though--this is definitely a "re-do" if we return!