Week 11

Holy sh*t.  I can’t believe I did that. 

On Wednesday I launched myself out of an airplane at 13,000 feet (with a professional skydiver strapped to my back to keep me alive)! 

That easily ranks as the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Sitting on the lap of a strange man on the floor of a small rickety 30-year old Cessna airplane with my feet dangling out of the open side-door, 4 kilometers in the air above the prairies. Then 8,000 feet of freefall for 60 seconds and a smooth parachute glide the rest of the way down.

I’m not exactly sure “why”.  But I think it was therapeutic in some twisted way.  Perhaps it was the act itself that required relinquishing absolute control of my fate, or perhaps it was the hasty but emotional hand-written letter to my family that I left behind for them to find in the event that I hit the ground at full speed.  Or if nothing else, it made for another good story from the sabbatical…

Also had a great day on Friday with my youngest son as we set off on a road trip to Drumheller to check out the dinosaur museum.  After about 5 visits over the past 15 years with the kids, this was the first time any of my “guests” had the attention span to last more than 30 minutes. I finally had the chance to make it to the end of the dinosaur exhibits and find out what actually happened to them (until now I had assumed over-industrialization of a carbon based economy).  We also did a guided tour through the local hills and found several small dinosaur bone fossils which was kind of cool. That was enough to satisfy my long held desire to become a paleontologist.  We thought about cloning the DNA in the fossils to genetically recreate the dinosaurs in order to populate a for-profit theme park on a private island.  But turns out it’s been done before with mixed results.

And finished the weekend with my oldest son on an amazing fly-fishing float down the Bow River.  It was way better than the couple of corporate event fishing trips I’d done in the past, as this one included beer, 80’s rap music, no corporate bankers, and we actually caught fish (shout out to our friend and expert guide Scott Rayner!).

It’s going to be tough to top this past week, but I’ll keep trying.