And another! Teach me to go on holiday :)



I'm gonna bore you all to tears now with the tale of my skydive!!

We got to Rotorua on Monday fully intending to do our skydive the next day, I was so scared and couldnt sleep or eat breakfast, when we woke it was cloudy but we went off to the airfield anyway, filled in "our incase of death forms" chose our height and then got told that it was far too cloudy to jump so we should go home again and try again that afternoon.

That afternoon it rained... so no jump that day. The next day, after another sleepless and breakfastless night it was another cloudy day so we phoned in advance and we're told to try in the afternoon, so we made alternate plans and then phoned in the afternoon. No jump today at all, try again tomorrow, they said. Only problem was, that was the day we were supposed to catch a coach at 8am to get back to Auckland, so we re-arranged our travel and decided to stick about, thinking we'd be so pissed off if it turned to be a sunny day, and indeed how pissed we'd be if it turned into a cloudy day as this was our last attempt at a jump after our one in Franz Josef was cancelled. so not feeling very confident we actually managed to sleep!

And to our joy and fright we woke up to find not a cloud in the sky and a quick phone call confirmed that he jump was on!!!

so at 9am our time we were picked up by Kelly the Pilot and driven back out to the airfield, I decided to risk going higher after being so scared and having to wait around so long, so instead of doing the 9,000 foot jump I was gonna attempt the 12,000 feet one!!

I met Matt who was going to be my jumpmaster and Eric who was Emma's. "Dont worry." Matt Told me confidently after I told him how scared I was "This is my first jump too." Oh dear!!!!

So we were strapped up in our jump suits and harnesses and I asked Eric what the little baggy was that we was wearing.

" Oh thats the spare Parachute." I glanced at Emma worriedly and he smiled and then reassured us that it was just a life jacket. Kelly brought our plane down to land and He waved Emma on to the plane. I followed, looking for Matt who seemed to have disappeared..

So I climbed onto the Aeroplane, meeting Phil who was gonna be taking my pictures as we fell. Matt jumped on board and away we went. Matt instantly starting winding me up, making me look at how high we were out the window and the little dial on his wrist showing how many thousand feet we were up. I couldnt look out the window and was gazing up at the roof and he suddenly just pounced on me and i nearly jumped so high that I fell out the top of the aircraft!

" I wanna swap with you!" I told Emma, but it was too late, suddenly we were at 10,000 feet and I had to sit on Matts lap while he attached himself to me. He quickly went over the falling out procedure and then it was time to go! I started to protest, but he hustled me out the door and I was hanging there, still trying to convince him that I didnt want to jump when suddenly away we fell!!!

It was so scry for about 3 seconds, I cant even remember what happened, and then suddenly Phil was in front on me taking our picture and even though we was falling, it stopped being so scary! We fell to about 3,000 feet and then Phil dived away and Matt opened the chute and I was so relieved! And then the bugger decided to wind me up again.

"Lets go over here!" he said cheerily steerting our chute away from the landing site and towards the lake. And then he put the chute into a spin and we were hurtling to the ground and I screamed again and he told me the chute had failed!!! And then he righted it and started laughing at me, and I told him as soon as we got to the ground I was gonna hit him and he promised to behave!

The whole parachute bit was so awesome, you lose all perspective about how high you are and just have the most amazing views while they spin and go round corners nad whatever. And then we landed and I just wanted to go up again, higher this time!!!

But we had to hurry back to get our Coach and thats the essay!!

of our parachute jump!!!

pictures are being posted back to england as we speak!!