WOMEN ON THE WING

It has indeed been a long, long weekend. Even though I had taken Thursday and Friday off in advance of the holiday weekend, it hardly seemed like enough extra time. To be sure, a little more housework got done, but there's still lots more to do. I still have the dining room and the other half of the hallway to finish carpet cleaning, but (thank goodness) other things pulled me away from the joys of household chores.

On Saturday, it was a shift at the Coke Bottle Ring Toss booth at the Saanich Fair, on behalf of Rotary. I'll say one thing about that particular booth -- you never really have a chance to get bored! You're pretty much on the go all the time. If you're not collecting money, then you're busy retrieving rings out of the Coke bottle matrix, or dodging the rings as they're being thrown at the Coke bottles. Joe volunteered to help for the day, so that was great. He was deeply appreciative that I managed to pick the shift with the very best weather of the entire weekend at the fair. It's been pretty dismal, weather-wise for a holiday weekend.

Given the weather, Sunday was a bit of a bust. I spent a bit more time at the fair, actually going and seeing the exhibits, which I didn't get a chance to do on the Saturday. But aside from that excursion, it was pretty much a lay-low kind of day.

Monday was the BIG EVENT of the weekend. This was the day we gals (me, Peni, Pia, Brianna, Ann and Lorri) were going ziplining. This was at the instigation of Lorri, who was looking for some moral support to help her overcome her fear of heights. What better way to challenge that fear then by ziplining, she thought. So she innocently emailed us a few weeks ago, thinking that we'd all say "no" to this particular adventure, but we all said "yes". And then Brianna put the reservation on her credit card, and we were all locked in...no getting out of it. We were committed.

The AdrenaLine zipline folks are out on the road to Sooke, right at the 17 Mile Pub. We were scheduled for a 10:30 a.m. tour, which all-told took about 2 and a half hours by the time we'd been geared up, learned the ropes on the 'bunny hill' (an excellent introduction to the course by Lee and Lloyd, our young Aussie & Kiwi guides), headed up the hill in ATVs and took that fateful first step off the platform at the aptly-named "Commitment" line, so-called because once you've stepped off the platform, you're committed to the rest of the course: there's no other way down. We all cheered on Lorri as she made her first run on the bunny hill line, and cheered even louder as she took off on the Commitment line at the top of the hill. All told, there are eight different lines to get you down the hill, the longest being 1,000 feet in length, and the highest I believe had you zipping along 150 feet above the ground. The second-to-last line, at a higher angle than the rest, is the speediest, whizzing you along at a velocity in the vicinity of 65kph, they told us. There were also a couple of suspension bridges thrown in for good measure, to test how steady our nerves were!


We were all very proud of ourselves, and had a great time. We would highly recommend it to everyone. We capped off the day's adventure with a BBQ lunch back at Randy & Lorri's place. Randy gets top marks for his culinary efforts; and those efforts were much appreciated indeed! George and Jim drove out to join us for lunch, so all in all a very pleasant afternoon. (See some high-flying pix of us gals on my Flickr site (see sidebar for link).