Birthday Flights of Fancy

For Doug's birthday, I bought him a training session at Lookout Mountain Hang Gliding. This is something that's been on his bucket list for years and so I decided that it would be the perfect birthday present for him. We had to be in Chattanooga at 8am which meant getting up at 4am to leave by 5. That was REALLY difficult. When we got there, his group did what they called "Ground School". They took a small training glider to their bunny mountains and learned a bit how to control it and glide and land. That lasted for about 4 hours in which I sat in the car and watched movies on the IPad( gotta love it!) and read my book. The one downside was that there was NO bathroom, so I had to make nice with the bushes in the area. Good thing I am not allergic to poison ivy! After ground school, we broke for lunch with an appt for his tandem flight at 3:15. We headed to the landing zone after lunch to wait for his tandem flight. It's really cool how they do it, they tow them up in ultralights and then release them when they get to 2000 feet. The couldn't do the run and jump thing - it's too difficult with 2 people. They took pictures while they were up there:

They had a camera mounted on the glider so that you got pictures of the whole trip. I got a video too, that I need to upload. He had a blast on the tandem flight - but it was a long day. We finally made it home at 6:30 in enough time to eat something and pass out. I had to get up early the next morning for our first dog show of the season. We had a really nice day out in TN - I would recommend them to anyone who is interested in doing something like this!