Weekend Fun and the Zip Line
What a fun weekend! It started out at 10 am with a mountain unicycle (muni) ride at Soquel Demo Forest. Jason, Aaron, Chris B and I rode up Highland to drop in at the top of Soquel demo and hit up Braille Trail. Kevin was a little late, and without cell reception we didn’t know he was going to arrive, but he fortunately caught up. Chris had to leave early to hit up a kid’s birthday party, and oh man, did he miss out!
Since we are all cell phone junkies we all captured some nice little video clips and uploaded them to You Tube.
Me on the log bride:
Aaron and me riding and falling on a log:
Jason on another log bridge:
Me doing a high speed launch:
Afterwards, we all went back to my house. We were going to drink some beer and then Jason was going to fix his handle while Aaron and Kevin helped me wrench on the car. Then, I had an idea: Zip Line! Let’s get it going again. The gang was on board, so we found a sweet spot and set it up. Long story short, it was a TON of fun! But, it still required you to brake a lot with gloves and you couldn’t just free fly down without hitting the ending tire/tree way too fast. My neighbor had a great suggestion of just putting it higher in the tree and having it sag in the middle. Then, you could drop off at the middle and pull the pulley back to the start. So, today I spent most of the day rearranging it higher in the tree, and it works even better! You can now zip down hands free. I still need to make a better launching platform, but it works (albeit a little scary your first time).
Original platform from yesterday below, and new one above.
I actually put it another third higher in the tree, but realized it was way to high and hard to launch from, and I had to move it down lower. Notice that I still need to build a bridge, and I want to extend the launching platform to make it easier to launch from (and safer).
Here’s rather crappy iPhone 3Gs video of the experience (warning: load!). You can tell when I hit the tire at the other end.
The iPhone records fairly good quality videos, but it does a poor job of uploading them to You Tube.
Overall, a very fun weekend. And Louise came home from her Aerial Silk trip to Colorado! Unfortunately she left again to go to tahoe with a friend (hence, I’m on the computer…)
