I survived my first experience LOing at Summerfest! Yay! I am writing this the Monday after Summerfest (and now on Thursday as well, because I can’t sit down and focus on a blog all at once) and I feel like I’ve been flattened by a herd of exuberant party-elephants. I feel like the last time I slept well was in 2016. Being back in the regular-folks (non-jumping folks) world is so jarring after a week+ of skydiving, I don’t recognize where I am. Whoa, Summerfest. I’m reeling. But what a reel it was! Thank you for the lovely time!
(Note: I have stopped caring about saying ‘first’ because I would rather be excited about never having done something before and, as a consequence, buy beer. That’s much more fun than pretending that I’ve already done everything. I’m way over pretending to be cool. Partly because it never works anyway.)
My Summerfest LOing Schedule Strategy:
So, never having done this before, I figured I could organize most of the days, only taking off a couple for my big girl job (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday). By the end of the first Sunday, I melted into a small puddle of sleepiness and fatigue (but the good-happy kind). Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I worked at my big girl job, writing software from the van (yay, for mobile wifi! Less yay for how stuffy the van got. I had to fling the doors open and let the muggy breeze try to cool down the van). I snuck in a few jumps on my days off of LOing and I also snuck in a little pond time in the afternoon. However, my days off went fast. (The whole thing went incredibly fast.) Then, I was back at it Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I signed up to organize Sunday, but the weather had other plans. (In fact, all FF LOs were voluntold to organize Sunday.)
As freefly LOs, we bounce between the different skill levels for groups. For those who haven’t been to Summerfest, there are 4 skill levels: ninja, advanced, intermediate and beginner. If I remember correctly, the first day, I rounded up beginners. The second day, I organized advanced. Then for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, I wrangled advanced, intermediate, beginner, respectively. It was a lovely time! Honestly, the first couple days of organizing was spent just feeling out a cadence, how Burble worked, whether I should be double manifesting, how big group size should be, etc. etc. But by the time I rolled into Thursday, I felt reasonably confident.
The Jumps
I had such a lovely time! I jumped with Aussies and with Brits. I jumped with people I knew well and a lot of people who are now new friends! One my favorite parts of load organizing is vampirically feeding off of the stoke of others. Which I absolutely do. I love how amped people are to jump with me! A lot of them are eager and excited and just absolutely tickled to do skydives with you. Especially beginners. Often, beginners spend the entire jump where their facial expression waffles between frowning in concentration and just beaming from ear to ear. They will get down from the skydive and rave when you get a single dock. I love it. I totally feed off it. As a self-proclaimed Eager Eagle (shout out the other original Eager Eagle, Christina Chan), I am all about doofus-levels of enthusiasm, to the point that it’s probably not cool.
I had some great jumps too! Unfortunately, I didn’t drag very many video flyers onto my loads, so I left Summerfest with few outside video shots. That being said, Nick Nash and Trunk did make me and some of my organizees look pretty good. I did some fun headdown sequentially type things on my Advanced days. I did a lot of zipping around high fiving peeps on my feet on my beginner and intermediate days. I nearly fell of the plane and did an epic swim on the hill. (Then my organizee showed me his video and it is epically embarrassing; I am just living proof that LOs are fallible. I looked like a total kook.) I did a couple 2way head-up rounds on my beginner day! It was neat.
The Activities!
Every night, the tiki hosted ridiculous games and activities; I did not anticipate how many I would participate in. Saturday night, Tracey introduces all the LOs. What I learned from that is 1) I definitely need a more abbreviate fun fact 2) I should bribe some people in the crowd to cheer louder for me. Of the other nights, I participated in paint and sip, the ship or sinked thing, and the ice block challenge. Obviously, I attended all the nights. (When the option is staying home in a hot stuffy van and eating PB sandwiches for dinner, the Tiki and the Eat Up truck take the cake, far and away.)
Of the games, I went into the ice block challenge with the least enthusiasm and but surprised me by being quite fun. Richo and I had to defrost some frozen clothing items and put them on. We were given block of frozen clothes that had a glove, a scarf, a t-shirt and a godforsaken dress. (The dress was our undoing… it was impossible to get thawed.) The hosts created a whole bunch of convoluted rules about one team member playing corn hole while the other one thawed the clothes. The corn hole player could win bonuses for your team and penalties for the other teams. Overall, I only sunk about 1/6 corn hole attempts, scurried around a lot, and had a pretty good time.
The ship or sinked (or something) game ended well, despite looking like a total disaster. Several teams had to construct a boat out of cardboard and tape, then we had to put one of our teammates (Polina) into a box on this raft, push/swim that raft out to the floating dock island, and plop our friend in the box onto the island. It was a mess. We chose the most genius of all designs; stacking many layers of cardboard on top of each other, frantically taping them together quickly, then twiddling our thumbs as we watched other teams construct pontoon-like structures. Someone taped a shark fin and cardboard flippers on Richo, so that was useful.
The real MVP of the evening was our Aussie recruit, Roy. Not only was he a swimming powerhouse, he employed cunning and strategy to help us win: He acted as a human chain between the boat of the team in front of us and ours, essentially forcing them to drag not just their boat and their person, but to also drag Roy, our boat and Polina along with it. Honestly, the whole thing was a sinky-cardboardy mess. Our team won, but I think we won on a technicality. (The technicality being that the announcers knew more of the names of people on our team so I think they chose us out of sheer convenience. The race really was neck and neck though.) I think we won some certificates, but I have no idea where they went or who used them. I hope they ended up at going to a good home.
Personally, paint and sip was… meh. I probably could have worked harder to make it fun. However, I was just tired that night. LOing just drains me of my social energy. Most nights at the tiki, I would have been happy to sip a drink, idly listening to other people chat, and staring into space. By the end of the jumping day, I was hungry, tired, and desperately in need of an eggy shower that would (somewhat) wash away the layer of sticky that I’d accumulated throughout the day. (Was it sweat? Dirt? Humidity & condensation? Pond water? All of the above?) So by the time I had to get up in front of an audience and paint, I didn’t have much in me.
But short story: The evening games were so fun! If you’re waffling on whether to participate, do it!
More Activities!!
Dude. The magic show, the Saturday night demo, and the party were all so much fun. Last year was my first Summerfest and I only attended the 1st weekend. I had no idea what I was in for. The magic show blew my mind. Having never attended a close up magic show before, it dazzled me. I am pretty gullible, so I fall for a lot of stuff, but I just kept getting surprised. Also, major props to all the magicians working in like 114% humidity that night, or whatever it was. It was so sticky.
I heartily enjoyed the Saturday night demo + fireworks + the party. I’m pleased that the powered paragliders stayed alive; watching them fly, they seemed to have a death wish. There was a big motorcycle + explosion situation before the fireworks. I didn’t totally understand the stunt but big explosions are fun (when intentional). And my favorite swooper did a night swoop! He and some of his wingy friends did night XRW with pyro and he did big swoop. What a cutie. The Saturday night party was poppin’ and the costumes were great. I think my favorite costumes were 1) Beth was the claw from Toy Story (with all the aliens? Super clever) 2) A very authentic looking looney toons martian 3) a girl who looked like she was dressed up as some kind of black hole or black dwarf star in black body paint and a big golden crown thing. Otherwise, everyone else just wore lots of shiny silvery costumes, glow sticks, glitter, etc. You can’t go wrong with a lot of glitter. The stage setup where Rook DJ’d blew my mind. I can’t imagine how much time went into designing and building this massive rocket/DJ booth. And every so often, big spurts of flames shot up into the air behind him. A live violinist rocked out for a bit and everyone danced.
Weather
The weather gods smiled upon us on Sunday; low clouds rolled in before I even woke up and they just sat on the dropzone all day. Rain continued the whole day and jumping wasn’t an option. All the tired LOs celebrated. I lolled around on the mat and at Eat Up, chatting with whoever was around. I can almost always be talked into skydiving, but my social muscles were tired from LOing all weekend, so I welcomed the break from herding cats.
Otherwise, we had decent weather. Monday was reasonably windy. A few other days either started with clouds that eventually thinned out, or some clouds rolled in throughout the day, but we didn’t experience anything too serious. The jumps went forward, we prevailed. Jumps occurred. Fun was had.
Overall, I just had an awesome time. I learned so much and I just hope I’m invited back next year 🙂Â