Brian got very surprised this year by a skydiving adventure for his Happy Birthday. He had no clue until we arrived at the airport. At first he thought he was going to be flying a plane and then he looked at me and said, "Or...are we going to be jumping out of planes?" SURPRISE! Here he is with his instructor, Laura, getting suited up.
Those 2 little blips are us! Brian jumped first, so his chute is the one on the bottom. It was really crazy getting to watch him jump! He went from sitting right next to me to being about the size of a dot.
Here's Brian coming in for his landing...which he took a little hard on his bottom. His instructor misjudged the landing just a tad, which resulted in a 10ft skid in the sand, thus also a nice crotch full of sand! But at least it was soft sand on the beach!
And here I come with my instructor, Garth. We landed on on feet.
We survived! And it was so incredibly awesome...unlike anything that you expect, since we never really felt like we were falling. We got to do flips out of the plane, had about 60sec of freefall, then 8-9min of hangtime. We highly recommend it!
We headed to Yosemite National Park on the 18th...it was a free National Park weekend, so why not take advantage?! Our first hike was to Lower Yosemite Falls (above). It was a short hike, but then we did a lost of pseudo-rockclimbing to get to the pool of the waterfall.
You can see Upper Yosemite Falls in the middle of the pic above. It is reportedly bigger in the spring and early summer and by the end of August will be dried up.
This is Vernal Falls, taken on our 2nd and more strenuous hike of the day. We went to the top...1.5 miles...the first half all uphill, the second half up many, many, many rock stairs. It was gorgeous though. Once at the top, we jumped in Emerald Pool in our clothes for a very refreshing swim. There was also a natural rock waterslide that of course we had to go down.
This is the view from Glacier Point. The large roundish rock in the upper left is Half Dome. Off to the right is Nevada Falls, which is just above Vernal Falls where we had hiked earlier.
Our final mini-hike of the day was through Mariposa Grove, one of the home of the Giant Sequoia trees. They really were massive and quite impressive. But it was also starting to get dark and Lori+hiking through the woods at night=Not so much fun, so it was time to head home!
