Dodge trucks, the biggest peril to an aspiring Sky Diver?

There’s a post that’s supposed to go between this one and my last one, which I will finish writing soon, and when I do this little bit will be deleted, but for now this little disclaimer is required so that everything makes some form of contextual sense.

Last night whilst me and Bryce were carpooling home, we were speaking about when to schedule our next jump. Now that I’ve been mildly bitten by the bug, I want to go again as soon as possible, however, finances aren’t superb at the moment so I have to be a little bit cautious. After a little bit of calculating expenses and schedules, we decided that Saturday or Sunday at the very beginning of February would be the best time. As we decided this, I have to say that I had a few of the small tremors in my stomach again, the mixture of excitement, fear, apprehension and nerves. We spoke a little more about it, whether we would be able to fit in 2 jumps, if we might be able to complete AFF levels 3 & 4 in the same day (unlikely but definitely worth an attempt), what time we would need to get there to be able to spend some time in the wind tunnel before hand, then we settled into our regular crap talk for the homeward commute.

As we were cutting through L.A., a minor disaster struck. Bryce’s 4 year old, perfectly running truck stalled, dead. We managed to make it to the side of the road where there was a gas station and sat there for a few moments. The truck fired up again and we made it through the rest of LA and back onto the freeway. Unfortunately as we were driving down the freeway, the truck stalled again. With myself hanging out of the passenger side window, waving my arms at the cars in the lanes next to us to show we needed to come over, we made it onto the shoulder. Anyway, to cut a boring storing short, the truck kept stalling and we limped home (the remaining 30 miles) using surface streets and the occasional hard shoulder.

So, what does this have to do with Sky Diving? Unfortunately Bryce now needs to buy a new vehicle, and, factoring in all the expenses, all of his toys and fun budget is likely to be eaten up for the foreseeable future. This leaves me in a bit of a awkward situation. I don’t want to continue on my AFF by myself, there’s a comforting feeling being able to look over at someone who’s doing the exact same thing as me, with the same amount of experience. Also, I would feel bad saying the next week about how much fun I had, knowing he couldn’t do it. I guess over this weekend I’ll have a little think on it and see if I can come up with any possible plans. But for now, Sky Diving is on indefinite hold.