Wedding Tandems

Yesterday a friend of mine got married and as he had his ceremony at one of the local paragliding school's ranch, he asked me along with another tandem pilot to take his photographer and videographer tandem to get some aeriel footage.

I was pretty skeptical that it would happen at all; the forecast called for rain and I figured that if it were sunny it would be windy and we wouldn't have much height to play with over the ranch.

But I went along anyway, launched when we were told to, and surprisingly found some good climbs that got us nice and high. We were to fly over the ranch at 12:30, and we got there at about 12:35. I noticed that the ceremony looked a bit funny from the air as people were standing all over the place and I couldn't see any action happening.

We landed fine, packed up, and walked towards the wedding guests only to find out that the bride was late! 45 minutes later she showed up, and the ceremony took place. I was pretty happy - I had never been to a wedding before so it was cool for me to see the actual ceremony.

Later I took one of the wedding guests tandem which was a lot of fun. It was quite windy by then, and it didn't help that he was a skinny guy, but he really enjoyed the flight and should be taking lessons soon. Very cool. When we landed a couple young kids were dressing up in my tandem passenger gear pretending to be pilots - so cute!

I had a little bit too much "fun" during the reception and took advantage of the free wine which had me paying the price this morning. All in all, it was a good day and I am still amazed that we were able to pull off the tandems exactly how they should have gone. Paragliding doesn't usually work that way...

Congratulations to Jason and Crystal Warner!