Standing in Awe: Costa Rica

*The videos on this post are quite blurry. Not sure why but that happened after I uploaded them.

Lance talked me into going on a zip line canopy tour. And I'm glad he did. It was quite an adventure! Unlike anything I've ever done before.

We had a choice of course: regular or EXTREME. After watching the videos, I thought the regular would be extreme enough. Not Lance, so he signed us up for extreme.

Ready or not!

This truck took us up...and up....and up. I think we were going 1 mile an hour up most hills because that's all the faster the truck could go up the hills. It was steep.

None of these pictures really do the height or scenery any justice at all. But in the picture above, you may be able to spot where we were headed. It's a beige platform about in the middle of the picture just above where the zip line disappears. It was a LONG ways away.

I can't find any stats about the length or height of the lines or approximate speeds. But my guess was that we probably reached speeds of 30 miles an hour. There was no chance of surviving a fall. I feel the most comfortable when I'm in control and know what's going to happen next. This was WAY out of my comfort zone.

Just a couple cable lines wrapped around some trees. And not the biggest, sturdiest trees I had ever seen either!

The EXTREME version meant that we'd have longer and faster lines, and that we would "fly superman style!" Sitting on a platform and zipping sounded just fine to me, but my superhero was ready for flight. The first line was tandum, so we got to fly together.

We were also a bit disappointed that this video doesn't do our run justice. It looks pretty slow, but trust me, it wasn't! Apparently, we had a pretty rough landing compared to the others. You can see the stoppers at the end of the line that look a bit like corks. There were guys on the end waiting to time our landing just right by pulling on a rope to slow us down. We were given the instructions to fly until an orange flag and then drop our hands to our sides and put our head down. The only thing you can see when you're coming in is a tree. And I truly thought we were going to head straight into it! You can see the rough landing at the end of the video. My whole left side went numb, and I thought my shoulder and back were rammed out of place. But thankfully, I felt much better pretty quickly. I did end up with quite a bruise on my shoulder from the impact!

The next two were singles.

After our last line, we landed on this platform in a tree. Next we had to basically free fall down a line. I thought this was much worse than the zip lines!