Taking to the skies

As you may have seen on the twitter feed, we wanted to take to Argentinian skies in a glider (for Stephen) and a parapente (paragliding) flight (for Christina).

Unfortunately the tandem glider pilot decided I was far too big for his little glider and so it was parapenting for two. Even for parapenting there were size considerations.

They took one look at me and sent for a specialist, the self-described ‘strongest small man’ in the region, Mattias.

There were 5 of us passengers that day and we had to wait a bit for conditions to pick up. When it got a bit breezy, they grabbed Christina to be the guinea pig and fly first. She was very brave and shot off the top of the mountain like she was on a high-speed elevator to the clouds.

This caused a flurry of activity, with poor Mattias going last with his big pile of ballast. Thankfully conditions were perfect and Mattias took me up to say hello to Christina before doing a few swooping dives to keep me entertained. He explained diplomatically that he’d like me to lean into the turn for best results…

We have gopro video from the flights and apparently Christina got a bit green around the 20 minute mark. If I can figure out an easy way to edit video, we can all watch Christina turn green together.