For quite some time now, I have had a very small yearning to go sky diving. But, as you've read in prior posts, I am not at all an adrenaline junkie. Not sure I can make it happen.
So, when my sister mentioned the air tunnel, I immediately added it to my list. I couldn't think of a better time to head down to Eloy, about an hour south of Phoenix, to try it out. My friends Cheri and Bevla joined me.
We started out with approximately 10 minutes of training.....if you could call it that. Then they suit you up. There were about 8 or 9 of us in our "class". Once we get suited up, we go into the air tunnel seating area and wait our turn. We signed up for the one-minute experience, which means we each get one minute inside the air tunnel, twice. Didn't seem like much time.
There were two guys that went before us, one did really good and the other had a heck of time. He kept hitting the wall and flipping over, not in a good way. Our very cute instructor boosted our confidence by pointing out that we could definitely do better than that guy.
And so we did!
It was really fun. Pretty easy for the most part. You just cross your arms in front of you and fall into the air tunnel. I would recommend keeping your mouth shut though, it's pretty easy to druel as soon as you get in the air. But certainly I'm not speaking from personal experience. ;)
The instructor is there the whole time to help guide you and keep you from hitting the wall. They give you hand signals to tell you if you need to relax, put your arms out, bend your legs, etc. The one minute really is a good amount of time for the first time. And on the second go-round, at the end of the one minute, the instructor connected to us and flew us higher up into the tunnel a few times.
That may be the closest I ever get to the real thing.
Just past the mid-point of the year and I am not only caught up with my blog posts, I'm not falling further behind!
July in Phoenix is always fun. I think June is technically the hottest month, but man it sure feel like it's been July this year. The hundred & teen temps are out of control. I heard someone say that it's really sad when you think 100 is cool, because you've been so used to 115+. I thought that was pretty funny. July also traditionally brings our great monsoons, but we just haven't seen much of that. Even for Fourth of July, when I generally head down to southern Arizona, the storms were non-existent when they are usually fabulous. I have never seen a better storm than in southern Arizona.
But, no such luck this year.
Quick trip down to mom & dad's in Sonoita for Fourth of July. Not a whole lot to report, except for a few words on the Fourth of July parade in Patagonia.
I love small town events. The attendees are always so serious about every aspect. For my parents, it was imperative that we leave two hours prior to the start time of the parade. "We need to get the right spot under a tree." At the time it seems slightly obsessive. What on earth will I do in Patagonia for two hours while I wait for the parade to start? Surprisingly, the time went by very quickly. And, once the parade starts, I really appreciated that two hour jump start. We have prime real estate right under a tree with front row seats. Sweet!
So what can I say about the actual parade? Not a whole lot, it was typical small town parade. If you're from a small town, you are sighing a sigh of nostalgia right now. If you're from a big city, you probably don't get it. The candy thrown into the streets, the ridiculous "floats", the water balloons and water gun fights. Great fun. Almost makes me want to move to a small town.
I feel like I'm losing my "umph" a bit with the adventure part of my new years' resolution. I had kept Zumba and Pilates in my back pocket for those months that I was super busy and couldn't get something more exciting done. And I had already used up Zumba in May. It was fun, don't get me wrong. But it wasn't overly adventurous.
I'm not sure where June went, the month zipped by me pretty quickly. And so, I found myself using up my Pilates card. But, it was something I had never done, and it was fun. Okay, not "fun" per se, but it was good to do. I was sore for three days. Maybe four. But still, not necessarily exciting. I would have to step it up in July.
For my trip in June, I had a business trip planned to Dallas. I actually went to college about 40 miles north of Dallas, at the University of North Texas in Denton. It was North Texas State Universrity when I started, but changed its name a couple of years before I graduated. I had been back to Dallas many times since I graduated, but I never made my way up to Denton. I hadn't been there since the year after I graduated. 20 years ago. So, I engaged two of my old college friends to take a nostalgic trip back in time.
We started out by eating lunch at the Black Eyed Pea. Love love LOVE it. We used to have them here in Phoenix but they closed. And, my friends and I had partaken in a bit too many libations the night before. So it was a perfect, greasy, comforting option. The same old Black Eyed Pea that I used to eat at in college. It was still there, exactly the same.
That's about where the similarity ended. Twenty years later, Denton had changed. And the University had certainly changed. There were new buildings everywhere. Many new streets. Less trees because they had given way for the new buildings. I'd say there were more new buildings than old. When I went to school there, Denton had a population of about 65,000, and the school had about 15,000 students. Now, the city has doubled in population, and the school is now 36,000 students strong. Crazy growth! And they had torn down the then-new hotel that had educated me in my last two years of hotel/restaurant management school, to make way for a new football field and sports complex. It was wild.
We drove around to check out where we used to live. Hollyhill, the older of our apartments, looked better than when we lived there. Our duplex on Gardenview, however, was totally ghetto, it was hardly recognizable. We drove down Fry Street -- historic, artsy, home of the famed Fry Street Fair, which ceased many years ago. I had heard rumors that our old favorite pizza place, The Flying Tomato, had burned down several years ago. What's funny you can search Fry Street Burning on You Tube and get all sorts of videos!
I'd also heard that the whole Fry Street area, where we'd spent many of our college days, was bought by a development company and was going to be replaced with new strip centers and a bright, beautiful, drive-in CVS pharmacy. So sad. It was such a historic, artistic, party street. We'd spent many, many hours at the Library......every college town has one. We'd watch The New Bohemians, before Edie Brickell made it big, along with many other bands, at this dive. So I was not too excited at the prospect of seeing what had changed on Fry Street. I feared it was all gone. But I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, the Tomato was gone. And there was no sight of The Library that I could see. But the area was still full of character and grafitti. Ah, the good ol' days.
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