Zip Line

Facing fears yet again as I signed my life away and strapped on a crazy harness designed to keep me from plummeting to my death. 

The harness itself is pretty hilarious.  It has to go over your shoulders and so it sort of hikes up into your crotch really tight.  This is embarrassing and uncomfortable.  See photo.  I think it sort of looks like my crotch is eating the harness, kinda like when you stretch out a piece of gum and then bite it in the middle and keep biting until both ends get into your mouth. 

It looks no better in the back.  Check it out.  When I had to return it at the end I told the guy it might be a little wet because I may have peed a little bit.

Here I am walking a tight rope.  I kind of lost most of my fear because the harness was super safe, and they had ten extra safety measures and so I never really felt like I was in danger.  I was still scared of heights in the way that I was scared of heights when I went to the top of the Jing Mao tower in Shanghai, standing behind very safe glass, but looking down nonetheless.

I got the hang of it really fast.

Twice I got stuck out on a line.  The first one was not very steep and we were told to keep a hand on the line.  I must have pushed down to hard because I stopped 30 feet from the end.  I had to turn around and hand-over-hand it back.  The second time I swung like Tarzan from one tree to the next, and didn't grab the guys hand properly and so I swung back in between the two trees and just hung there for a while.  They had to haul me in.

This next photo is of my friend B.J.  As you can see, when you get done with the zip line, a man is there to receive you.  He unhooks your caribeaner from the line itself.  Then he hooks you to the safety rope on the platform, and then he unhooks the extra safety harness and ties that up.  But look at how B.J. intelligently put both of his knees to one side so that he didn't have an embarrassing episode of straddling the man.  I wasn't so fortunate.  Everytime I ended my zip, I ended up with both knees past the man's hips, on either side.  And I was suspended in air, so it was quite "intimate".  After a few times I learned that I could sort of swing a knee around and avoid the situation, but of course I wasn't that smart straight out of the gate.

Another thing you can see from the next photo is that the lines are way high up from the platforms.  So, me being 5'2", they had to hoist me into the air every time to hook up my harness to the wire.  Also they had to hoist me at the end to unhook my harness from the wire.  And so my crotch got yanked like a hundred times.  Plus it was already so tight up in there.  Yes, highly embarrassing and uncomfortable.