It is time for one of those posts. The ones that my mother, affectionately, tells me make it sound like I’m in Florida on vacation, and not an internship. So, I will start this post by saying that I clocked in over 40 hours this week.
I had the privilege of having Monday off with a good friend this week, someone I don’t usually get to spend a lot of time with outside of work due to conflicting schedules. So we decided to go to a zoo.
I suppose we could’ve gone to Animal Kingdom, but what’s the fun in that? We were looking for an actual zoo.
Fortunately, there is one just north of Orlando, the Central Florida Zoo. So he and I hopped into the car and made the hour-long trip up to go look at some animals. Not going to lie, it was kind of a let down.
Maybe it is because the Nashville Zoo is beautiful, maybe it is because I’ve grown used to the Disney standard of things, I don’t know, but the Central Florida Zoo was not all that exciting.
The biggest thing for me was a lack of lions, tigers and bears (oh my!), and the general lack of atmosphere throughout the park.
We literally walked around a plot of cleared land that looked like it may have once been intended for an exhibit but was abandoned long before anything was actually done to it.
A cougar at the Central Florida Zoo.
But: the day was really fun, we looked at all of the animals that they did have (including rhinos, giraffes and cougars) and then grabbed a bite to eat at a restaurant in the historic district of the city.
By the time we got home, I was super tired and went to bed almost immediately.
Tuesday thru Friday I spent waiting for the weekend, working long shifts and celebrating Thanksgiving with my coworkers. It was all very fun, but nothing compares to Saturday.
Because on Saturday, Nov. 28, 2015, I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane at an altitude of 15,000 feet.
My coworkers and I before our jump.
I fell for almost 2 minutes.
And then a parachute deployed, allowing giving me spectacular views of the Florida coast.
On Saturday, I went skydiving.
It was one of the most exhilarating and exciting things I’ve ever experienced. It was beautiful. My jumpmaster and I parachuted for almost 10 minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. We could see the NASA building, the ocean miles of beautiful coastline.
During the parachuting portion of the skydive.
He would pull on one of the strings and we would circle around in the air like a helicopter seed for a bit, and then I would see my coworkers below me, spinning around themselves. It was just incredible.
So, we had a lot of fun this week, and I’m looking forward to seeing where our next adventure takes us.
