What happens there...

This past weekend, I experienced Las Vegas for the first time. My buddy Dale gets married in a month, and he's also never been to Vegas, so he decided that his last fun thing to do as a single man should be to experience all that Las Vegas has to offer. While I will stay true to the tagline of "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" (by the way, an amazing brand-building tagline, one of the best of the last decade in my opinion), I will tell you about one thing we did while we were there.

Besides never having been to Vegas, the other thing that Dale (and most of us as well) had never done was....skydiving. That's right, jumping out of a perfectly good airplane for no apparent reason.

For the months ahead of the Vegas trip, I was absolutely psyched that I was going to skydive. As it got within a week or so before the trip, I started getting a little nervous, but still felt mainly excited. My friends started to slap their hands together and say "Splat!" whenever they saw me, which really helped keep me at ease. Luckily, the job search and traveling kept me from really thinking about the fact that I was jumping out of a plane soon.

It didn't really hit me that I was going to skydive until I was about to land on the big plane arriving in Vegas. I had the window seat, so I spent the entire descent looking down at the desert, realizing that in a little over 24 hours, I'd be seeing this same view again, but in a much smaller plane and with a parachute strapped to my back. Once we got on the ground, however, the events of our first night in Vegas were more than enough distraction to keep my mind off of the jump the next day.

On the day of the jump, besides the hangover that was easily fixed with a Bloody Mary and some Eggs Benedict, I was also feeling very nervous. We got in the bus around noon and started driving away from The Strip towards the desert, and it was probably the most quiet the 8 of my college buddies have ever been when in the same general vicinity. When we got there, we had to watch videos which explained the danger we were about to put ourselves in, which gave us all some nervous laughs. Then we got to sign our life away on a waiver that I purposefully didn't read a word of, since every line began with "In case of death or accident...".

After the waivers, we each got our jumpsuits. We didn't get to pick the color of our jumpsuits, which proved to be a nice moment of embarrassment for me as well. Everyone else was getting black suits, blue suits, green suits, brown suits.....I got purple. I'm not talking about dark, Minnesota Viking-style purple. They gave me My Little Pony-style purple. I put on my bright purple jumpsuit, and of course, laughs burst out throughout the room. Even though the laughs continued, I pretended not to let it bother me, and countered their heckles with "I'm confident in my sexuality, and I'm about to do the most manly thing I can think of, so bring on the purple suit! I'm cool with it!"

After that was the waiting. It takes a half an hour to make each parachute, and there was only one guy making chutes that day. He started before we got there, but with 8 guys going, we still had a good 2 hour wait before even the first group of jumpers got to go. We passed the time by nervously watching the Borat movie, then Batman Begins. Then we finally got to start going. We went in groups of 2, and my partner was my buddy Drew. They put the camera in our faces and asked us if we wanted to say "goodbye...oops! I mean hello" to anyone back home, giving us one last freak-out, and then we got in the plane. They taught us where to place our hands and legs during the jump, and then we were off. This plane was the scariest contraption I've ever seen. Every little tiny gust of wind, and we blew across the sky. I started getting that dry mouth feeling that you get when you're really nervous, and we kept climbing in the sky. Then, all of a sudden, we were at 6000 feet, and it was time to go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-9oJoC9dVA

It was by far the coolest feeling ever. It took me at least 15 seconds of that jump to remember to breathe, because all I could see was the ground getting closer and closer. Once the parachute opened up, I received 5 of the best minutes of my life, just looking out over the Nevada desert with Vegas in the distance on one side and the Rocky Mountains on the other.

The one thing most people don't realize is how fast you are really going even after the parachute opens. All the parachute does is slow you down from 120 mph to around 20 mph. You still are coming at the ground pretty fast! I didn't realize this until I was about 100 feet from landing, and I had one last freak-out moment when I thought, we're going to slam into the ground! But the "put your feet up and slide in" technique worked perfectly, and it was a completely safe landing. When I got up, it took a few minutes to remember how to walk, because my entire body was in pins and needles mode, but after that, I felt the best rush of adrenaline of my life.

It took all the patience in me to wait for all of my friends to finish their jumps before we could get back to The Strip. Again, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, but let's just say that 8 college buddies full of adrenaline and excitement hit the town that night.

The rest of the details of the trip will have to stay locked in the 8 groomsmen's heads forever. But I will tell you this. Skydiving is one of the best memories I will ever have. I highly recommend it.