More on the Rantoul trip:

Jon and I were going to fly up to Rantoul in our little plane, the Cessna. We are renting the Cessna out to a smaller drop zone in Rome, Georgia; so that meant we were going to drive to Rome first. However, the drop zone owner of Skydive Atlanta, in Thomaston, Georgia, called up Jon and asked him if they could use the Cessna that week. Jon explained we were flying to Rantoul, and SA's dzo (Trey) said, "What a coincidence! I'm flying up there with my wife; that's why we wanted to use your Cessna. I have some students and need another plane."

To make a long story short, he flew over to Cullman in his King Air and picked us up. The trip by car is about 8 hours. By Cessna it's about 4. In the King Air, it's about 1.5 to 2 hours. It's good to be the King! Er, good to have a King. Whatever.

Steve was injured at Rantoul early on. He was landing and ran into a golf cart. He received a bunch of stitches and spent the rest of Rantoul on crutches. He tore some muscle but didn't break any bones. That has to hurt, however. I was happy to hear that no one got dead or seriously messed up. Sure there were standard broken ankles and other mishaps. And that guy we passed wednesday night who was staggering around the bonfire with a bottle of Jack Daniels probably wished he was dead the next morning.

I have met a good deal of people in this sport. I am chagrined to realize a great deal of them have less time in the sport than me. Those who have the same amount of experience as me I tend to think of as equals. A few of them I regard as fools, but if you have not crunched yourself out of the sport by a thousand jumps you must be doing something right (for the most part. Some people are just lucky or stubborn). The ones who have more jumps than me I tend to respect; I also have a very few I consider personal gods. I was thrilled to run into one of my personal gods at Rantoul; he has the wonderfully baroque name of Winsor Naugler III and we got to talk a while but it was too windy to jump. I hope I can bring my own posse next year and get him to jump with us.

"Posse". Sheesh. I mean a group of formation skydivers. I was the only one from Skydive Alabama at Rantoul who does formation skydives. Everyone else does free flying, which I don't do. I should work closer with some of our younger jumpers to get them competent with formation work so that our drop zone doesn't become a free fly only dz. I did some jumping with my brother and some other younger jumpers last weekend and I had a good time. It also gives me an opportunity to work on fundamentals.

Ah, well; I'm rambling now. Check out Lilek's bleat today. He spends some time berating some of the latest fashion trends.