Slogan on the wall at the skydiving operation at the airport where I’ve been flying gliders:
More seriously (if only slightly so): It’s the policy at our club that all glider occupants – whether student pilot, pilot, instructor, or passenger – shall wear a parachute. (Story I heard is, we get a discount on insurance premiums for having, and enforcing, that rule.) Now, this doesn’t mean that most of us actually know how to use a parachute. We all get a ten-minute lecture on how to abandon ship (several steps which must be done in the right order), deploy the chute, and how to steer it and land. Just one brief lecture. No actual practice, of course.
ETA: I’ve contemplated the idea of taking a few skydiving lessons just so I would have some sense that if I ever had to abandon ship, I could do it and not just panic and die. Besides, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, I need the adrenalin!
There was a MLB baseball team that removed a player due to an small injury on the second-last day of the season. Later the team announced that the injury status of the player was listed as “Day”.
My bucket list included seeing a total solar eclipse with my own eyes (#1 in 2009, #2 next week), and still to do: seeing the Aurora Borealis, visiting Yellowstone National Park in winter.
I see your point, but in my travels I have found it very easy to strike up conversations with people (and I am not all that outgoing, really), so if you do decide to go and do things without a travel companion, I bet you won’t be all that “alone” if you are open to talking to the people around you.
And, of course, you could pair up with some Dopers. StGermain, for example. Or you could do a **tour **of Dopers. I live in Austin and would enjoy showing you some of our sights if you came here; I know we have members in a lot of interesting places and I bet lots of us would host you.
Best of luck with whatever you choose to do and I hope you enjoy the heck out of whatever it is.
