Skydiving in hurricane season – Part 1

Hey everyone!

This is the first part of my multi-part article about my trip with Geneviève to Florida.

We left Montreal on Saturday the 8th at 6 am, the TSA was quite easygoing with Geneviève’s rig at the airport, they even let her through with her hook knife (We’re unsure whether or not they even noticed it).

I got the whole drug and explosive scan done where they swab my hands, belt and shoes to see if I’ve come in contact with anything suspicious. (Good thing I left my grenades and cocaine at home that day or I’d have been in a ton of trouble haha)

 

Once in Florida, we did the usual rental car thing, got a pay as you go plan and headed over to our hotel. Perry’s Ocean Edge “resort”. It was a 2 1/2 star Motel on the beach, couldn’t really ask for more in Daytona Beach without spending an arm and a leg. And what skydiver in his or her right mind will start paying good skydiving money to stay in a nice hotel when he or she is used to sleeping on an airplane hangar floor?

The hotel staff were nice enough to upgrade our room and give us a view of the ocean. Geneviève, having never seen an ocean before was extremely happy about that.

 

We didn’t really do too much that day as we were exhausted from our super early wake up and our flight.

Come Sunday morning, we met up with Tara from UPT who took us to a breakfast restaurant called The Old Sugar Mill.
It’s in a protected park that has some very nice trees and scenery.  It’s a pancake place that lets you make your own pancakes on a griddle in the middle of the table. It also happens to be the only restaurant in a 50 mile radius that actually serves REAL fruit. (this will be important in a later article)

 

After breakfast and a mini tour of the area, we headed back to Skydive DeLand where Tara had parked and she handed me a box… A 30 Lb box…

This 30 Lb box however, contained my rig and my new Neptune N3 altimeter!! =D

 

We toured around the DZ (The tour will be in the next article) and with enormous excitement I opened my box to find all the goodies inside!

Here’s a picture of Tara and I while I was trying it on.

 

The day was way too cloudy and windy to get any loads in the sky, so after hanging around the DZ for about 3 hours we headed back to our hotel. I went to take a nap and ended up like this:

 

Needless to say, I was a VERY happy camper.

 

Coming up in the next article: Our tour of Skydive DeLand!

 

Blue skies everyone!

 

Adam