Skydiving in Switzerland

Driving from Paris to Switzerland was our longest drive day and we were on the bus forever!! We left Paris in the morning and didn’t get to our hotel in Switzerland until almost 7pm. I slept for a few hours, we watched 300, I read my last two books and we played this quiz. That I won. Well me and my partner did. He knew all the geography answers and I knew all the random facts ones. Just in case you were wondering the one fruit you could survive on if you had to is avocados. And the author of The Twits is Dahl. We both won a bottle of French wine and a bar of chocolate but we gave the chocolate to the kid on the bus because she won third place and she was pretty bummed that 1st and 2nd won prizes but she didn’t. We’re so nice. And it had nothing to do with the fact that I don’t like chocolate. Nothing at all. HeeHee!

Our hotel in Switzerland was unreal. I had the best room in the place and I had it all to myself. I could have stayed there for a month! My window opened to the Swiss Alps and I actually woke up to the ringing of cow bells as the goats ran down the mountain. I felt like I had fallen into a scene from Heidi. I spent two days expecting to hear Grandfather calling for her. :D The entire country is incredibly beautiful! Mountains, lakes, adorable towns. Not to mention, the food was the best I’ve had in Europe. I loved it. 

Monday morning the entire group went up the mountains to Jungfrau. Apparently it takes two hours to reach the top by train but the incredible view makes it worth it. However, I didn’t go up with them as I had a better view in mind. I went above the mountains and then jumped out of a plane at fourteen thousand feet. Trust me my view was much better than everybody else's. :D

I had decided to go skydiving in the Swiss Alps before I had even left the States. Google had told me that it was in the top three best places to do it and since I had wanted to do it for years I thought that I might as well go for it. Only I wasn’t sure I would actually go through with it once I got there. I think I spent more time worrying about it before I signed up than I did once I was in the plane getting ready to jump. 

I signed up and paid the night before and somehow I slept like a rock. I had a lazy morning, ate, played on the computer and finally the shuttle came to take me to the airplane. Apparently, the people in the bus had been making bets on what nationality I was but no one had guessed American. Even after I showed up, most people thought I was Australian. Well until I spoke at least. My damn accent gave me away pretty quickly.  

We got to the airfield, put our not-so-sexy jumpsuits on and got a grand total of two minutes of instructions. Seriously, they told us to grab our harness, put out head back onto our instructor’s shoulder and to keep our knees bent. That was about it. Oh, and that they’d tap us when it was time to put our hands out. They didn’t even teach us how to land until we were parachuting down. Then I had to wait and wait and wait. A daughter, dad, and daughter’s boyfriend team were going together so I got placed on the second flight. (Dad, get ideas! Lets do it!) The waiting was the worst. The only way I was able to go through with it was by not thinking about it. Which is really hard when you’re watching other people jump. Finally I was assigned an instructor and they did a short interview for the video and it was time to go. They have this silly speal where they try to freak you out by saying that the harness is frayed and how Mick has had a hard day and might be feeling a little suicidal. Funny enough, that’s when I stopped being scared and just got excited! Even on the plane they tried to scare me and I’d just laugh. It took about ten minutes to get high enough and WOW! The view was incredible! All these snow capped mountains and then dozens of perfectly blue lakes. Just amazing. I couldn’t stop looking out the window. They had to keep calling my name so I would look at the camera. Eventually it was time to start jumping. They hooked me up to Mick, and let me tell you, my butt has never been pressed so tightly against another person. I couldn’t even wiggle. All the professional jumpers went first and then I was the first one to jump from the group of first timers. That was freaky but it worked out fine. Mick and I scooted on our butts to the door, I stuck my feet out and wrapped them under the plane and then he tipped us out. 

I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain how it felt for the last couple days and I still can’t figure it out. The second my butt left the plane, all I felt was pure awesomeness. No fear. There were a couple of seconds where I could see the plane and I had just enough time to think, “Hey! I did it! and then we flipped over. It didn’t feel like I was falling because the wind was so strong that it almost felt like the wind was lifting us up instead. And the view. Oh my God. Just WOW! If you watch the video you will see me repeating “Oh my God” over and over again. Much too soon, Mick deployed the parachute and everything went completely silent. The craziest part was seeing how fast the camera man was falling. One second he was right in front of me and the next he was fifty feet below. All I could think was “Holy Shit, was I falling that fast?” It didn’t feel like it at the time. After we spent a few minutes checking out the scenery and just floating around, Mick taught me how to land and then it was over. 

I can’t wait to go skydiving again. It’s one of those things I think I could do a million times and still love it. Too bad it’s so expensive. I should probably pay off my credit card for this jump before I charge another. Damn. :(

One side effect of going skydiving is that it turned me into a superstar on the tour. As if having a camera man follow me around wasn’t enough! (Everyone who knows about my phobia of being filmed knows how much I enjoyed that one. :p ) Everyone started straggling in around five that night and every single person would run up to me and say “Brittany Did you do it?” “How was it?” “Were you scared?” “Did you like it?” The bus driver even took eight pictures of a random skydiver in case it was me. And then about a dozen of them waited up until I rode the bus into town to pick up my video and then walked back so they could watch it. Then they watched it again. Then they badgered me into letting the entire group see it on the bus the next day. For the last two days, I have not gone two hours without someone coming up and asking about it. At dinner in Florence, I met the manager of the hotel and she said, “Oh you’re Brittany! I’ve heard so much about you!” Even the tour guide had told her about my jump. 

A very crazy experience! 

In the sky!

Best view ever!