"It's okay, I caught it all on my T***Ts!"

The first hint of trouble was the sound of a small body retching coming from the living room. The second hint was Mathieu diving across the kitchen to grab a roll of paper towels before he dashed out to where his wife was nursing Xavier, their 4 week old infant. I turned to Philippe and asked "Isn't she sitting on your leather couch?" That's when Kim called out that everything was under control, that she had contained the mess in an inventive manner, and the couch was safe. No doubt Mathieu was thorough, and thoroughly enjoyed, cleaning up her... um... food stations.

In the laid back casual way that comes so easily to Philippe he took another sip of wine, shrugged, raised an eyebrow, and said "Yeah, I'm in no rush to have kids." An understandable sentiment considering the circumstances, but I'm counting on him and Josee to deliver at least one member of the 4-way team I have planned.

 Xavier will be Outside Center, Derek and Kat's baby girl will be flying point, and after Philippe and Josee have made their contribution all I will need is one more to have the next world champion 4-way team in hand and ready to start training. Here's the plan: A 4 way team comprised of 4 infants that learn how to fly in the tunnel before they can walk! This won't be without a number of technical problems such as finding teeny-tiny helmets and wee little RW suits with itsy-bitsy grippers, not to mention the difficulty of communicating with and coaching the little munchkins, but think of the possibilities! They'll be hard wired to fly! They'll clobber everybody in all the tunnel competitions and when they're old enough to actually skydive they'll be unbeatable! Sponsors of every description will be lining up to throw money at them! I'll be the coach, Derek can be in charge of physical training, Kat will be responsible for diet and health, Philippe will take care of dive flow and exits....... I've got it all worked out. Any skydivers who are planning on having any children in the near future are encouraged to apply on their behalf.

But I digress. I'm seated at the bar in my favorite Skydiver Bar, The Bent Prop Saloon in Eloy Arizona. I have an almost empty beer in front of me with another on the way, and this is where I will be spending the next 6 or 7 hours until Beth comes to collect me and we check into our room at the Super 8. We're here for the Arizona Challenge, a high quality invitational skydiving event that has earned a reputation as a particularly difficult and, of course, "Challenging", event. Ten years ago when I was here was the first time I heard of and saw video of the Challenge, and ever since I have been angling to earn one the highly coveted invitations to the event. No matter how high the bar has been set in previous years the organizers still manage to outdo the last Challenge. I checked in with manifest as soon as I arrived to pay my outstanding balance and was presented with my event T-shirt which had the final planned skydive plastered across the back. The plan calls for a bizarre combination of 80 people building compressed accordions in such a complex formation that I know no matter where I'm supposed to be I'm going to get lost on at least half the dives! I studied it for a few moments, and when the girl at the counter informed me that I couldn't have my money back I decided the best course of action was to get just as plastered as the shirt. 

I didn't really want to jump today anyway, during the entire 1 hour drive from Sky Harbor airport there were always at least half a dozen dirt devils in sight moving across the desert, some of them up to a couple hundred feet wide and reaching a couple thousand feet into the air. Columns of air moving unpredictably at high speed in a tight circle don't mix well with parachutes. To cap it off the winds were blowing at a near gale when I arrived and that alone was more than enough to convince me I didn't really need to jump. 

So here I sit at the bar, a couple of feet from the popcorn machine, one ice cold bottle replacing another, and for lack of anything else to do, I'm planning my quest for world domination of the sport of 4-Way Formation Skydiving while I wait for Beth to come rescue me. All I need is one more baby...... 

Wrote this a few days ago and forgot to post it

Before the course started I rode down to Sarasota to visit a buddy from Ottawa who lives here in the winter. Dave owns the pool hall down the road from where my store was. The plan was to go for lunch, but it became an epic pub crawl that included beers at a yacht club, watching the sunset from a stool in a Tiki Bar, karaoke, and finishing with a night shooting pool at “The Lizard Lounge”. I kid you not. I picked the place out when trolling through the GPS for one last bar. How could you not want to check out a place with a name like that? It took most of the next day before I felt halfway civilized again.

3 Years ago when I was down here I met some youngsters on sport bikes at a gas station and they took me to a series of abandoned roads that was meant to be a subdivision. When the recession hit the developer walked away, leaving behind a couple miles of perfectly smooth freshly paved asphalt roads that weaved back and forth with no curbs or obstructions to hit if you went down and not a house in sight. There was one road in and out, no traffic, no kids cars pets or alligators. You could see from the rubber left on the surface that it had been well used by the local motorcycle and sports car crowd, and later in the day when I felt up to it I went to see if it was still there. Florida doesn't have many good bike roads so a person has to make their own fun. It was still there, and in use when I arrived. There were 2 bikes and a Miata ripping around when I got there, and by the time I left almost an hour later there were even more. I've missed this kind of riding since leaving the canyons of California behind. Full throttle in the straightaway’s, trail braking into the corners as I slid off the seat and leaned in to lower my center of gravity, trying to pick the perfect line, entry point, turning point, apex, exit point, then set up for the next corner to do it all over again. The only reason I left was an impending storm, I got back to the trailer just before torrential rain started.

There’s no jumping going on here today, a low, solid ceiling with high winds took care of that, so for lack of anything else to do I’m going to explain what AFF is (a couple of people have asked), and give you the best travel tip you will ever get for driving in the United States.

AFF stands for Accelerated Free Fall. It’s a way of taking a student right into free fall at 13,000 feet wearing and (hopefully) deploying their own parachute on their very first jump. They start out with an Instructor on each side holding onto their harness and coaching them with hand signals, transition to one Instructor as they gain stability and control, finally jumping unassisted with the Coach or Instructor along as an observer and safety guy. It’s the best way to learn how to skydive, and in combination with tunnel training has greatly increased the learning curve and safety of the sport.

And now, a gem, a polished diamond for anybody who has ever had to run back and forth while buying gasoline in the US. Most pumps nowadays require you to pay first before they will dispense gasoline. Back home that’s no problem, just swipe a credit card and away you go. Not quite so simple here. When you swipe your card at the pump it asks for your ZIP code so it can verify the billing address against the card for security. Try punching a Canadian postal code with numbers and letters in it into a numerical keypad, it simply doesn't work. Until now that meant you had to go into the gas station, wait in line, pay with card or cash, go back outside and pump the gas, then go back inside and wait in line again to get your change or a credit on your card for the portion you prepaid but didn’t use. If I’m making tracks and covering some distance in the car I might have to go through the whole rigmarole 5 times in a day, and if I was having a throttle heavy day on the bike with no sure supply of fuel further on down the road I might have to do that little dance every hour or so.

No more! The very first place I stopped for fuel after leaving home was on the New York State Turnpike. I got out of the car, swiped my card, and when the screen prompted me to enter my ZIP code my heart sank as I realized I was going to be spending the next 3 months running back and forth several times a day when all I wanted was to gas and go. I had just turned toward the booth when I heard a voice from behind me “Ah! Another Canadian!” There was a guy wearing a Sunoco shirt standing there with a smile on his face. “Can’t get past the Zip code?” he asked. “Here, let me show you how it’s done. What’s your postal code”

“K1V 9T4”

“So the numbers in your postal code are 1, 9, and 4, correct?” I nodded. “Then enter 1-9-4, add on two zero’s to fill it out to 5 digits, and….” The pump hesitated for a moment as signals bounced back and forth between it and VISA, then “ Insert nozzle into fuel tank, push button to select fuel type, squeeze lever.”

Ho-Lee Crap-oly! Hallelujah! I turned to thank the guy but he was already gone, over talking to a confused looking man standing next to an RV with Quebec plates. “Canadian? What’s your postal code sir?” It looks like he was spending the day just walking around explaining to people how to buy gas, and I shall be forever grateful to Sunoco for putting him there. 

There Are Three Kinds Of Men.....

“There are three kinds of men. The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of us have to pee on the electric fence for ourselves.” Will Rogers.

I am so tired of peeing on that fence.

I’m just about ready to push all my gear together in a pile and set fire to it. Contrary to the opinions of some, I've always thought of myself as a half decent skydiver. And then I started the AFF course. I’ll spare you all the grisly details, but suffice to say that if I was actually going out the door with a student on the 4 jumps so far, if their automatic activation device had failed to fire 2 out of the 4 times I’d be explaining to 2 different families why their father/mother/brother/sister/son was being returned to them in a plastic bag. Even the jumps I didn't manage to kill my student on were far from stellar. On the first one I was giving my student hand signals so fast that it looked like I was a spastic deaf mute with cerebral palsy doing sign language. Even I couldn't figure out what the hell I was trying to tell him. And after every single jump, Bram, our Instructor, comes down all smiles, happiness and roses, high fiving and going on about what a great jump it was. He’s the kind of person that would find themselves at 100 feet over the cesspool, look down, and shout “Yippee! A water jump!!!!” At least I’m not alone. After every jump most of the candidates come staggering back into the packing area pale and shaken, wondering what the hell they were thinking when they signed up for this course.

There are 3 Canadians on this course, and one of them, Joey, is from Eden North in Edmonton. When it came time for him to debrief one particularly bad dive he climbed out the door of the mock-up, reached in, took Bram’s leg grip, prepared to start the recreation of the skydive and said “Okay, here’s where I ran into trouble’. A ripple of nervous laughter went through the group, partly because we all recognized the joke, and partly because we all knew that he wasn't joking.

When I went through the cupboards after moving into my trailer I found a “Baby Desert Eagle” My first thought was “Trailer Defence? Is the Zombie Apocalypse more imminent than I thought?” I’ve revised that train of thought. I’m pretty sure somebody placed one in every trailer to allow miserable, suffering, despondent, aspiring AFF instructors to put an end to their suffering.

 It’s probably not as bad as I make it out to be. I keep getting psyched up for jump after jump with Diane’s words of encouragement echoing in my head “YOU ARE GREAT! YOU ARE TALENTED! YOU ARE A GREAT TEACHER!” She goes on, however most of the rest of what she has to say doesn’t bear repeating in a forum my mother might read. But it did involve scantily clad Chinese cheerleaders, a plastic sheet, baby oil warmed to just above body temperature and….. well, you get the idea.

Bad skydiving isn't like Hell. It doesn't last forever. It just seems that way. 

Fandango? Really?

Right now I should be home, sprawled on my couch, remote in one hand, Grey Goose and lemonade in the other hand, my own bed upstairs beckoning me, my gas barbecue clicking and ticking as it cools after I've seared my dinner to perfection, my bike making similar noises as it cools after I've wrung it out on River Road coming back from Kemptville….

But instead…. I’m still in Florida. I’m sittin’ in a trailer recoverin’ frum havin’ written no less than SIX exams in less than 4 hours. Even if I left now now now now right now! it would take an absolute minimum of 2 days to get home, and aside from the fact that I’m way too trashed to drive right now there are so many great bike roads between here and there that it will take me at least a week just to get through the Ozarks, let alone Deals Gap and all the other roads that surround it. And on Saturday I start the AFF Instructor course, six 10 hour days with homework, going out the door with guys whose job is to play the role of the worst skydiving student in all history. They are going to be doing everything they can to screw me up and make me crack under the stress.

So here I sit. Thousands of miles from home, eating microwave meals from Walmart, trapped in a trailer on a DZ in Florida, surrounded by Skydivers, with a Bar 114 steps from my door (I counted), barely 2 quarts of Vodka in the freezer, no ice, THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A MOMENT, …..no ice. NO ICE!!!!!!!

“What’s your point” you’re asking?

Here it is: As John likes to say “Let’s all feel sorry for Larry!”

I have to keep reminding myself that:

“I’m not at work”

“Everything wriggles, everything works”

“There is no snow here”

“I’m not dead” (despite my best efforts to the contrary)

“I’m in Florida”

“There’s this girl….”

“I’m living in a trailer on a DZ,”

“My bike is fully fueled and waiting for me just outside the door”

Sigh. Life’s good.

The last time I saw him back in December Dan planted a seed “While you’re down there, go sign up with Skydiveratings.com, get your AFF rating, I can get you work!” I’m thinkin’ he missed the whole “It’s not that I can’t find work, I’m doing my best to make sure that work can’t find me!” thing. I had put the course completely out of my mind but a chance encounter with Bram Clement on the porch outside manifest in Z-Hills got it started all over again, and with Diane’s encouragement I signed up for the course. I don’t know if Dan gets the credit, or the blame, for what I’m about to go through, I’ll be able to answer that in 10 days.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My last entry was 2 weeks ago. Diane and I were on our way to the “I Wanna Lei you Luau!” in Deland. I had to get a pilot chute stitched onto my D bag when we got there, on my last jump in Z-Hills the day before the hacky tore loose from my pilot chute when I went to deploy my main. When I picked my rig up from Trevor he recommended that I replace the pilot chute, pointing out that it was getting quite worn and wouldn't be yanking my main out as well as one that wasn't so porous. I didn't pay him anywhere near as much attention as I should have, at that point I didn't even know if I would ever jump again, let alone plan to actually bring gear with me on the trip. The jump itself was a mess, the dirt dive was rushed and the guy keying the points must have thought he was with Airspeed he was keying the points so quickly. After I had tracked away and it came time to dump the pilot chute came out of it’s pouch just fine and pulled out my main, but in that brief instant between coming out and being released, the hacky had torn off the top of the pilot chute. I didn't even know something was wrong until I went to pack. If it had come loose a half second earlier my main would have never come out, I’d owe Trevor a bottle of his favorite party beverage when the reserve saved my life, and a case of beer for my first reserve ride. The moral of this story would be “If Trevor says Fix something, then FIX SOMETHING!!!

I found myself thinking about the 2 people that had died here a week earlier. A large group of skydivers had come down from Iceland for a couple of weeks, mostly experienced skydivers but also some students. An AFF instructor and his student were missing after a jump and a search found them a day later in the forest, a few feet apart from each other. They had never deployed their mains, and while the reserves had fired automatically when they got low enough they didn't inflate in time to save them. Nobody will know why they didn't deploy, and while there is no good reason to die, going in because of a worn pilot chute would have to be a particularly stupid one.

The boogie itself unfolded pretty much as expected with everything getting pretty blurry after the sun went down and the band went on stage. I do remember Hula girls though.

I dropped Diane off in Orlando last Wednesday to catch her flight back to Winnipeg then headed for my hotel near Z-Hills to spend the next 2 ½ days holed up in my room studying the books for the AFF course and for the Coach course I would have to do as a prerequisite. Out of all the hotels I have stayed in over the last month and a half, this one set a new low for decrepit and seedy. The blanket on the bed had so many holes in it that it would make a better net than a cover, the chairs and carpet were covered with various stains, one of which I’m positive was blood, and the toilet was so disgusting I actually had to clean it before I was willing to use it. Oh well, this is what you get when you go with the lowest bidder. I pulled a sleeping bag and sheets out of the camping gear in the car, I chose not to sleep on the ones provided with the room. At least it was quiet. Until the last night. That’s when I woke to the sound of sirens pulling into the parking lot. I spent the next 3 hours telling one Cop after another that I knew nothing about the guy who’d been stabbed on the floor above. It did have one perk: there was a Subway right off the lobby. I never actually eat there but the night the Coach course finished and I wanted to have a few drinks, it provided a steady supply of lemonade to mix with the quart of Polish Vodka I had bought for only $22. It started out okay, but every time I returned to refill my cup I was weaving and giggling more and more, until the girl behind the counter finally filled a large plastic jug for me and sent me on my way. I didn't know if she was being helpful or just didn't want me coming back again, nor did I care. I've now moved into Deluxe Accommodations in a trailer on the DZ, complete with running water and electricity, the very height of luxury.

The Coach course is over and done, I now have a few days off before the AFF course starts. The 6 people sitting at the table during the course represented 5 different countries: the US, Canada, Iceland, Germany, and Sweden. The first thing David, our facilitator asked for was our forms showing we had been signed off for having done our prerequisites of helping teach some first jump courses. Gunnar, one of the guys from Iceland said he had helped teach a course just before he came to Florida. “Great!” said David. “Is the instructor here? You need to get this signed before you can get your rating.”

Gunnar paused before slowly saying “He’s the instructor who……” The unfinished sentence hung in the room as we all realized the guy he was talking about was the one who had died the week before with his student while teaching AFF. Crap. It was only then that it started to sink in that I was going to take a course in a few days to learn how to do something that had cost 2 people their lives only a couple hundred yards from where we sat the week before.

The Coach course mostly went OK, but it did have it’s moments. One night my homework was to write a lesson plan to teach canopy control and how to fly a landing pattern. I spent 4 ½ hours on it, and the next day presented it with the other candidates as my students. It started well, I was drawing stuff on the white board to explain the concepts of “downwind, base, and final” but as I went on I started to get a little stressed and found myself skipping parts of the presentation, then backtracking to be sure I covered everything. I was soon scribbling more and more things on the board, until David finally stopped me and said “Step back here. Now look at the board and what do you see?” It was an incomprehensible mess of lines, squiggles, numbers, circles, and arrows. “There was a movie starring Kevin Costner filmed in the 80’s that had a skydiving scene ……” I didn't hear what he said after that as everybody in the class including me erupted in gales of laughter and then Peter started doing a word perfect delivery of Truman Sparks giving the worst, and most famous skydiving lesson of all time: “Okay now you’ll be coming out here and you’ll be doing a stable fall face down frog modified, now out here comes the static line cuz it goes from this to here see, and then the pilot chute will open and it will pull the bridle out and the main canopy will be open because they’re all connected…”

20 Years of Skydiving, a fortune poured into training, courses, classes, ratings, and I've become Truman Sparks?!?!?! A new low. Can’t wait for the AFF course.

Famous Last Words "I Know this guy....."

In the last couple of weeks we've been playing tourists. We toured Cape Canaveral and I finally got to see a satellite get launched, something I've wanted to see every time I come down here but the timing has never worked out. We watched from the old Mission Control building where they monitored the Apollo missions from, and we even got to touch a piece of moon rock!

Went through the museum belonging to Mel Fisher, the most successful treasure hunter to ever dive the Florida coast. It was filled with the gold, silver, emeralds and pearls salvaged from "Nuestra Senora De Atocha" and her sister ships that were part of a treasure fleet returning to Spain that got caught in a hurricane. Reading about his exploits was one of the main reasons I learned how to scuba dive when I was a teenager, only to discover that all the lakes and rivers in Canada were full of rocks and mud, not treasure and cannons. We even got to hold a gold bar brought up the day one of the divers hauled up 167 POUNDS of Gold!

Took an air boat ride through a cypress swamp seeing at least a hundred alligators in less than an hour, getting close enough to some of them we could have counted their teeth. We weren't in any danger though, alligators are like Harleys, they can go fast in a straight line but can't corner worth shit, so just keep weaving back and forth and you should be able to outrun them. In truth I wouldn't want to put it to the test.

Spent a day on the beach playing with my kite and getting sun burnt - Diane got the worst of that by far, going straight from Winterpeg to a day on a Florida beach was probably not a good idea but it felt so good at the time. Diane picked up on it pretty quickly, mastering self launching after a crash and even loops in just a few minutes. I learned one very important lesson as well: Don't crash the kite into the ocean - they don't fly for shit when they're full of water! I didn't realize how bad off Diane was until I was slapping first aid cream on to her back, and she started squealing in pain, comparing the way I was slapping it on to a flogging. Don’t worry, everything will be fine, the kite dried out and we managed to shake all the sand out of it.

We visited a bunch of the central Florida DZ's - Lake Wales, Sebastian, Z-Hills, Deland, jumping with some old friends and some new friends.

We've searched out local cafe's and restaurants, getting great meals including great service with genuine smiles for a hell of a lot less money than if we'd eaten at a Denny's or some other chain restaurant. My personal favorite was “Loreen’s Café”. As Diane put it: “If Saturday Night Live did a skit about a back woods, gun toting, flag waving, bible thumping, God fearing patriotic diner, it would look like Loreen’s”. The walls were decorated with current and collectible recruiting posters, pictures of proud soldiers, sailors, and airmen, flags and banners from every branch of the armed forces, and more American flags than I could be bothered to count. And T-shirts. They were hung along one wall, bearing slogans that most Canadians would not consider politically correct. “If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read it in English, thank a Vet”, and “Welcome to  America, Now Speak English!” The right to bear arms figured prominently in several of them. But the food was awesome, and I don’t think the prices had gone up since the Vietnam War. We went back just so Diane could take pictures.

One of the things I had planned to do during this trip was to take kite board lessons. I spent some time on a dock drinking beer and watching people shooting back and forth on a previous trip here and ever since have wanted to try it. While researching the subject I discovered that Skydive Sebastian had branched out and now had a kite board school. It's run by Lyle Presse, and when I called to set up a lesson he said “My son is going to be your instructor, he’s an International Kite Organisation certified instructor, and has been kite boarding most of his life.” Score! I couldn't possibly get a better instructor than that! Or so I thought. Diane and I were sitting in the restaurant when Lyle came walking up with his son, and the first thing I thought was “Crap! That kid’s not old enough to drive!” Turned out, he wasn't.  I later discovered that he had just passed his course, and I was his first customer. It didn't go well, I was still still limping 2 days later.

Any concerns I had about the instructor were overshadowed by my concerns about the boat. Normally they run customers over to a sandbar in the Intercoastal Waterway on a jet ski, but it was down for repairs and we were going to use a pontoon boat. “I haven’t had it out for a year but the mechanic serviced it yesterday, it’s all set to go”. But it wasn't set to go far. When it pulled up to the dock I looked down onto a floor that was carpeted with dead leaves and twigs. The carpeting was shot and portions of it had peeled away to reveal a floor that looked rotten, the cushions and seats were dried out, cracked and split. But the motor looked new, and after thinking about it for a moment I decided that I was a strong swimmer, already had a wet suit on which would give me added buoyancy, and there were lots of other boats around to fish us out if the thing went down. Now I know how our Tandem passengers felt when they looked around the inside of the plane and commented on all the duct tape. I should have gone with my first instincts, and just stayed ashore. We didn't get 50 feet from the dock before the engine quit and Lyle had to flag down another boat to tow us back in. The guys on the other boat were just cruising around anyway and readily agreed to run us over to the sandbar while Lyle got the engine fixed to come pick us up.

The lesson started out okay, the winds were light and steady making it easy to get the kite set up and the lines rigged. Since the winds were light we were using a large kite. He taught me how to launch and land a kite for someone else before I tried flying the kite myself. The first 10 minutes went well, I got the kite up and managed to fly it fairly smoothly around in the “wind window”, the area downwind of where you’re standing. Even my small kite can generate enough power to haul me around on the beach and this thing was 5 times as large, giving it  up to 5 times the pulling power if you're not careful. The winds started to pick up with occasional strong gusts so I was getting yanked around a bunch and dunked frequently but the kid had clipped a leash onto my harness so it wasn't anything I couldn't handle. But we weren't looking at the weather that was coming up behind us, and hadn't noticed an approaching rain squall. Suddenly the winds kicked up, I did the natural thing when the kite tried to pull the control bar out of my hands which was to haul in on the bar. That changed the angle of attack of the kite, almost doubling it’s pulling power, and instantly I was airborne, dangling between the kite and my instructor who I was dragging along behind me. I reacted by pulling even harder on the bar, increasing the lifting power of the kite even more with Eric shouting incomprehensible instructions at me. After what felt like an eternity of being whipped back and forth he finally screamed “Cut away! Cut away!” Great! That’s something I can understand! I reached forward and shoved the handle detaching the control bar from my harness, which de-powered the kite, and we crashed back into the water. After we dragged the kite back closer to the sand bar we untangled the lines, and, keeping an eye on the weather behind us, relaunched the kite, resulting in me promptly being dragged face down over a bunch of rocks. Survive a plane crash only to be done in by a kite? I just don’t know when to quit while I’m ahead. Around then Lyle returned with the boat and after a quick conference I surveyed the clouds and pronounced the weather unsettled and gusty and we packed it in for the day.

All of the above was entertaining, but something any tourist could take part in. And Then, We went to the Circus!!!!!

Martin Lemay had invited us to the Cirque Du Soleil show La Nouba at Disney in Orlando. “My buddy works there, he’ll give us a back stage tour after the show.” Yeah right. If I had a dollar for every time I've been promised something cool that somebody I knew was putting together with a “friend, buddy, pal”….

But Martin was as good as his word. Turned out his “buddy” was one of the trapeze artists in the show, and Martin had known him since childhood when they studied trapeze together. “He coulda’ gone Pro!” Randy said of Martin, instead he’s spent his life partying, skydiving, and generally having fun. The rest of it he’s just wasted. He lined up perfect seats for us, and they cost us less than I’ve ever paid for a Cirque show before. The performance itself was more like a regular circus show than any of their other shows, but done as only Cirque can do it. Minutes after the show Randy was leading us through all the basements, sub-basements, dressing rooms, up, down, and around the entire backstage area. And for La Piece De Resistance, we posed for a group photo on the stage. 

We've been to the Florida Keys, partying into the wee small hours of the night up and down Duval Street in Key West, taking trolley tours and visiting museums like I hear normal people do on vacation. Spent a day and night in Miami including partying up and down Ocean Drive in South Beach, and out of all the hotels in Miami we somehow wound up at the Hawaii, the same hotel I stayed in the first time I visited Miami. But this time our room faced the ocean and we awoke to the sound of waves on the beach as the sun rose.

But it's time to leave the normal world behind and get back to skydiving. We're at Deland for the weekend to attend the "I Wanna Lei You Luau" boogie, hosted by the Dirty Sanchez. If that sounds a little off the wall that's because it's supposed to. Tonight's festivities include a foam pit. You drive a bunch of tall stakes into the ground, encircle them in plastic, fill it with foam, toss in a bunch of drunken skydivers, and.......

Yep. The normal tourist stuff is over with. 

"Team Enema, this is your 20 minute call"

I got to Deland late on Friday afternoon, dropped the car and trailer at Gille Dutrisac's house, and headed over to the DZ. The plan for the rest of the month is to use Gilles driveway as a place to leave whichever vehicle we're not using as we skydive and party about Florida. The Shamrock Showdown 4-way Competition was in full swing and all the best teams in North America were there, including Evolution, the Canadian National Team. The look on Michel Lemay's face when I ran up to him to say hello and shake his hand with all my gear on while on my way to a plane was priceless! The last time he'd seen me I was lying on my back in a hospital bed in Montreal with a broken neck and couldn't even get the cap off a water bottle on my own. I intended to spend the evening drinking beer and getting caught up with Gilles before heading down to visit with a friend in Sarasota for the rest of the weekend, but I got roped into agreeing to do some Sequential Skydives with Guy Wright so I wound up returning to the airport Saturday morning.

My skydives went well, we were doing 4 and 5 point 26 ways. The only problem was when I opened low on jump number 3, turned around, and found myself off the end of the active runway precisely where a plane would be passing through on takeoff. I was staring straight down the runway at a Cessna sitting at the other end with it's prop turning. I don't know if he saw me or not and I wasn't about to take a chance and quickly spiraled down out of his way. One aircraft accident is plenty for me.

There was a team from Argentina there for the competition, and I don't know how their name was spelled or should have been pronounced, but when it came over the P.A. it sounded like "Enema". "Team Enema, this is your 20 minute call, Team Enema, 20 minute call." All day long every hour or so the cycle would  begin with all the teams getting 4 or 5 warnings over the P.A. of their boarding time, and every hour or so all the laughter, guffaws, and cheap toilet humor would start all over again.

Daytona Beach is 20 minutes away down International Speedway Drive, and Sunday is the last day of bike week. Everywhere within a hundred miles is overrun with bikes and trikes of every size, type, style, and description, but since this is America, there is a definite preponderance of Harleys. (or as George B. puts it "The - potato, potato, potato, potato, - riders" because of the sound their engines make.) Not a single rider on one is wearing a helmet, and most of them are dressed in jeans and t-shirts with the sleeves torn off to better display their tattoos. I'll admit I often feel hot and over dressed wearing my full face helmet and all my protective ballistic gear while riding, but I sure feel safe. I've ridden in a T shirt and jeans, and aside from feeling like I'm riding naked, having the wind constantly beating on exposed skin gets tiresome pretty quickly, but those guys sure do look cool!

It's also St. Patricks Day. I rode through Daytona Beach and up Highway A1A along the coast, every parking lot was jammed with bikes, and cops were everywhere. Every restaurant, bar, hotel, and even church had a sign up saying something along the lines of "Bikers Welcome".

 Beachfront bar just outside Daytona Beach

And it would seem that an invasion of motorcycles is not the only problem facing the Daytona Beach Police Department

Pete's Cabins

I'm comfortably ensconced in a charming little establishment along the gulf coast in the Florida panhandle called "Pete's Cabins'. I stopped here mostly out of morbid curiosity. To describe the place as decrepit and ramshackle would be doing an injustice to the true dumps and dives of this world. I had paused at the side of highway 98, the Gulf Coast Highway, to get a cup of coffee from Tami's Cafe and Wine Bar.  I asked the girl at the counter about a decent, cheap place to stay, and she recommended Pete's, just around the corner and down the block. "Don't let appearances fool you" she had said. When I walked over I had to wonder if she had meant the appearance of the Cabins, or of Pete? Pete looked like he washed up here in the 60's and hadn't had a shave or haircut since. The cabins looked like they had washed up here about the same time as Pete, and had received even less maintenance than Pete, at least from the outside. But when he showed me the inside of one it was clean and tidy, the carpeting and bedding was of a far more recent vintage than it had been in many of the places I had stayed over the last couple of months, and at $30 a night the price was right, so I booked a night. After the first night I decided to stay another, and if I didn't have plans to meet Gilles for Beer on Friday night I'd be here for a couple more.

It comes with high speed internet "Just run over to the cafe, their internet is on 24 hours a day". Breakfast "Just run over to Tami's, she has a dynamite breakfast!" Hot water, well, warmish water, well, okay, tepid water, as long as nobody else runs the water at the same time, but at $30 a night what do you expect? There was no television, no microwave, and no fridge, but I moved my cooler into the room and plugged in the adapter thereby providing my own fridge.

"You're lucky!" Pete declared. "I'm just about to shut down for the season!"

"Aren't you just about to hit the busy season?" I asked.

"Exactly!" he replied. "Too many people! Too much work!"

Pete doesn't just rely on the income from the cabins to provide a living, he's also a farmer, of sorts, on the side, as it were. Actually pretty literally on the side, when I opened the blinds next to the bed there was evidence of Pete's latest crop against the side of the cabin poking up above the windowsill. No wonder he doesn't want people around this time of year. Pete saw me looking and gave me a look that said "Don't you dare! I'll have to charge you extra!"

I think Pete and I are going to get along just fine.

I left Eloy last Thursday morning after the side trip to Utah, drove across Arizona in the rain - it has rained lots there this year, the place is so green I wouldn't have recognized it if I didn't know where I was - passed through New Mexico in winds so high the Highway Patrol set up checkpoints to order 18 wheelers and SUV's off the road, and crossed the endless Texas desert. I visited the Alamo and RiverWalk in San Antonio, and found both so jammed with people I gave up and went to sleep in my hotel room, returning to take pictures of the Alamo without tourists in the way shortly before dawn. The plan was to head for the Gulf Of Mexico to do some kite surfing but the weather was crap so I kept going, stopping at Spaceland outside Houston to do some jumps, but they had been fighting a losing battle with the weather all day so I kept going to Slidell, just outside New Orleans. A day in N.O. prowling the French Quarter (my kinda place! the bars are open at 10 in the morning and the bands start playing at 11!) a walk through one of those really cool cemetery's, a tour of some of the worst neighborhoods still not recovered from hurricane Katrina, and after 2 days I was gone, headed for Florida.

I guess Pete was pretty serious about shutting down for the season. When I returned after spending the day at the beach drinking beer and flying my kite he was pulling out the screws that held up his sign. "Just in case anybody gets a notion to drop by."

I'm heading over to "Tami's Tapas Bar" for dinner, coincidentally located right next door to a cafe with a similar name, it's Nacho Night! If the Quesadillas I had for dinner last night are any indication I should waddle out the door many hours later burping and farting up a storm, whether from the nachos or the oversize $3 draft I don't know, nor will I care.

A few years ago when I was shopping around for a new bike I saw a picture of an FZ1 with Monument Valley in the background, and I thought that if I was ever on a bike and in the neighborhood, I would try and get a similar pic. As I was preparing to leave Eloy on Wednesday morning I noticed the circle I had drawn around Monument Valley months ago on my Arizona map, and that was all it took to completely change my plan for the day. Instead of visiting Tombstone and then heading for San Antonio, I pulled the bike off the trailer, loaded the saddle bags with all the warm clothing they would hold, and headed north into the mountains. The mountains became forest, then high plains, then desert again, and 400 miles later, just after sunset, I pulled into Kayenta, just outside Monument Valley. The hotel was filled with tourists toting bags of camera equipment raving about the spectacular photographs they had just taken of the sunset in the valley. I may have missed the sunset, but there was no way I'd miss sunrise.

It was just above freezing in the predawn darkness as I drove into the valley. I took hundreds of shots as the sun rose lighting up the landscape in ever changing colors. And I had the place all to myself. All those tourists with all that equipment were nowhere to be seen. I even took a side trip down a dirt, sand, and gravel road into The Valley Of The Gods. I'd have spent hours driving around in there if I wasn't worried about running out of gas or getting trapped on the way back to Eloy by the winter storm that was forecast for Friday. Most importantly, I found the perfect spot, and got exactly the pic I wanted. With the morning light putting a golden glow on everything you can't even tell how filthy the bike is after driving that dirt road.

I took a different route home, picking winding mountain roads that brought me back through Flagstaff and down highway 60 through Globe, the area I had spent so much time tearing around in when I had stayed in Eloy 2 months previously. I was cruising along in late afternoon, paying no attention to how fast I was going as I enjoyed the gorgeous day, when I passed a State Trooper tucked into a turnout. I backed off on the throttle as soon as I noticed him but it was already too late, he hit his roof lights and started to pull out onto the highway. I hit nailed the brakes hard, managing to stop before I even reached the far end of the turnout. I had gotten off the bike and started digging in my wallet for "drivers licence, registration, proof of insurance" when I heard a voice say "Well, you're making progress. This time you were only going seventy-two miles an hour! But the speed limit on this highway is also fifty-five!" I whipped my head up to see the smiling face of the same Cop who had pulled me over the last time I came down this road!

I didn't know what else to do, so I started laughing, he started laughing, and the two of us stood there at the side of the highway laughing so hard I almost started to cry. The traffic going past slowed to a crawl as everybody gawked at the spectacle of 2 grown men at the side of the road laughing so hard they could barely stand up.

He finally managed to ask "I thought you said you were going to California?" I explained about California, and heading to Florida to meet Diane, and getting sidetracked by Monument Valley. "You drove to Monument Valley and back in two days? And how fast were you going? That's 400 miles one way!" I allowed as how I may have been going kinda quick but pointed out that a large part of the trip was in empty desert, and that speed limits didn't seem so important when I was the only living thing for a hundred miles. We spent some time discussing the roads he'd recommended the last time we talked before the subject of me tripping over his radar gun for the second time came up.

He shook his head, looked around, and finally said "Ya know, if I so much as punch your licence plate into my computer, it's gunna set off all kinds of alarms, your warning's gunna come up, and I won't have any choice but to give you a ticket, and because of the warning, you'll automatically get the maximum penalty." I didn't know what that meant, but it sounded just as bad as "That's a felony!" 

He leaned forward, and with a twinkle in his eye said "But if you're telling me you're on your way out of the state....."

I left town the next morning, destination: Texas.

P.S. I took hundreds of pictures in those 2 days, when I get the time to pick out some of my favorites I'll post a slideshow. (with Kim's help.)

"The Door Into Summer"

When I was a teenager I read a lot of science fiction, one of my favorite authors was Robert Heinlein, and one of my favorite books was The Door Into Summer. On the first page the principal character describes a year he spent living in a farmhouse in Connecticut that had 11 doors, plus a pet door fitted into a window for his cat, Petronius the Arbiter.

"Pete usually used his own door except when he could bully me into opening a people door for him, which he preferred. But he would not use his door when there was snow on the ground. Connecticut winters are only good for Christmas cards; regularly that winter Pete would check his own door, refuse to go out of it because of  that unpleasant white stuff beyond it (he was no fool), then badger me to open a people door. He had a fixed conviction that at least one of them must lead into summer weather. Each time this meant that I had to go around with him to each of eleven doors, hold it open while he satisfied himself that it was winter out that way too, then go on to the next door, while his criticisms of my mismanagement grew more bitter with each disappointment. But he never gave up his search for the Door Into Summer."

I arrived in Palm Springs 5 weeks ago. From the moment I arrived Beth has done everything she possibly could to welcome me and make me feel at home. She stressed repeatedly that I had the run of the place, that everything in the fridge and cupboards was mine, took me on a tour of all the facilities in the complex, the pool, the hot tub, the gym, took me around the neighborhood showing me the local bars, where the grocery store, the liquor store, and beer store were (It's all the same place actually, Ralph's grocery store - Vodka 30% off if you buy 6!). I have never stayed anywhere, either for a single night, a week, or a month, with anyone, where I have felt so comfortable and at home. Beth is in the hospitality business, and she lives it, she doesn't just pay it lip service. She even swapped her own bed for the futon that had been in the spare room, insisting that she couldn't let "the broken guy" sleep on it.

It's now time to leave. I've made one last high speed run through the hills to Idyllwild for one last cup of coffee at the Higher Grounds Coffee Shop, and spent a final afternoon lounging about the pool. Thank you Beth, for your hospitality and company over the last 5 weeks. I've found my Door Into Summer, and I will be forever grateful to you for sharing it with me. As you predicted, we repeatedly "Got up to no good!"

Tennessee Williams said "There is a time for departure, even when there is no certain place to go." Tuesday morning is my time for departure, though I know not where I shall go. Beth is gone for the next week on a business/skiing trip, and I type this sitting on the patio by the pool, watching people come and go from the hot tub. The car is loaded, the bike is loaded, and now I'm getting loaded. You can get a bottle of J. LOHR Seven Oaks for a ridiculously cheap price in this state, and it's been established on many occasions that I'm a terrible impulse shopper. I'm doing dinner with Lyal and Cathy in Eloy tomorrow night, but after that the plan gets pretty vague. I'm thinking I'll head east to find a good beach to play with the kite I brought and work on my tan. I only have one one appointment in the next month, and that is to pass through Orlando airport in exactly 2 weeks. "There's this girl......."

"Dave! you haven't had a reserve ride for a while...."

I've often mentioned the curse placed upon my head, and upon my children, and my children's children, and my children's children's children, by Dan BC a couple of years ago. Today he gave us a further demonstration of his powers. The beginning of the event included his usual thorough safety briefing. he doesn't simply say "Don't cross the runway if there's an airplane on final". He explains what final means, where to look for the planes, where to wait for it to pass, even showing us on an enormous blowup of the DZ to make sure we understand what he's saying. He doesn't assume we know what "Wait behind the flag line" means, he explains what it is, where it is, what behind it means, and defines the word "wait".

When he started to talk about emergency procedures he discussed the process of deciding when to cut away a malfunctioning parachute. then he started pointing at people in the room saying "Sergei! You haven't had a cut away lately! You're probably going to have one today! Dave Becker! Oh man, when was the last time you had a cut away? You're way overdue! You're definitely going to have a cut away on your first jump today."

So, of course, Dave had a cut away on his first jump today. If Dan singles me out in a safety briefing for  anything, I'm not going to jump that day.

We did 5 jumps on the first day, but with only limited success. Our coach didn't prep the dives very thoroughly, we only spent 10 minutes on the dirt dive for the first one which isn't much for a complicated dive for 18 people. The other 2 groups spent over half an hour getting ready, going through the lineup, the exit, and the dive, over and over again. Then they lay down on creepers and went through it some more. Our lack of preparation was reflected in the sloppy, largely unsuccessful jump. Our best jump of the day was number 3, but when we went up to repeat it we didn't do anywhere near as well.

Day 2
I'm with a new coach today, Josh Hall, who I've worked with quite a bit in the past. We spent a lot more time in the dirt dive, and despite my sliding into the wrong slot and having to fly around somebody to get back to where I needed to be it was a great jump. I even managed to make my extra moves look good. You can see the days jumps at: P3 60-Way Speed Invitational Day 2, Josh's group.

I've either been in the base or close to it on all the jumps so far and for the third jump I asked Josh if I could be one of the divers, putting me further up in the plane. I wound up being last diver, all the way up behind the pilot. I love that slot! I get to run the length of the plane, throw myself out, and dive down to catch the rest of them.

There's a tiny little very cute artificially enhanced Asian girl named Rosie in my group, and she didn't manage to stand up a single landing all day long. The winds were almost non existent and when she tried to run out her landings she kept tripping, doing a face plant, and sliding along in a cloud of dust. We wound up standing next to each other on the packing mat as we pulled our gear off and she apologized to her packer about all the dust. "Just look at me!" she said holding her arms out to display her formerly black jumpsuit, now dirty brown all down the front. I thought I was using my inside voice when I said "Would you like me to brush that off for you?" There were probably a couple dozen guys that had taken her up on the "Just look at me" invitation, they all stopped what they were doing and suddenly all conversation within 30 feet came to a halt as everyone waited to hear her reply. She straightened up, smiled, turned to face me, thrust her (considerable!) chest out, paused as she seemed to think about it for a moment, and smiling even wider, finally replied "Thanks! but I brought my own scrub brush of shame." A sigh went across the mat as everybody collectively let out their breath.

Nobody was more disappointed than I.

Saturday morning the warm ups are over, the first jump is a 56 way, Dan has promised beer if we do well.