This past Saturday, a few of us went down to the Black Forest in southern Germany to learn how to paraglide. We followed an American guy who lives in Germany and works near us. He and his wife go every weekend. Well, as you can see in the pictures, just going down there for the scenery alone was worth it! So you pretty much have a canopy like a parachute, only much larger. For instance, I jump with an eight cell canopy; these have 32 cells. So to practice, he kinda gave us a little intro with phrases like "oh and don't fly like this or it'll spin you into the mountain and you'll die." Or a phrase like"oh, i forgot to tell you, if you catch that thermal going the wrong way along the ridge, it'll slam you into the side of the mountain... and you'll die." So, four experienced skydivers were a little nervous about trying out this paragliding thing. Nope, we're not in the US anymore. No insurance waivers or signing on the dotted line. Just pay the man in cash and have a nice flight! So the deal was to just position the canopy behind you, face downhill on the side of this ski slope and just start sprinting. Originally he said, "you need to get running about 20 miles an hour in order to get lift." And I'm doing the math in my head thinking, "C'mon dude we're not Olympic sprinters!" Anyway, it did workout great and we had a good time. Just watching everyone else was a good time too. Oh yeah, the bad part was the when you got to the bottom(if you can see the houses in the picture, that was the bottom) you had to grab your rig and hike back up. So we all got a good workout that day. A little altitude training is always goooood.