Trip Report: Hang Gliding Photos

Last weekend, I went hang gliding and posted about it, but there were no photos!  Consequently, the post was perhaps somewhat boring.  The reason I didn't have photos last week was for a very retro reason -- my photos were on a physical roll of film!  I had to go to the store and drop it off and come back later, and now I have a bunch of little pieces of paper with images on them!

But, since it's 2010, I also got a CD with the pictures.  Here is the first one, on the ground before lift-off:

That's me and the tandem guy who kept me from dying!  The line in front of the glider is attached to an ultralight plane.

Here's a photo taken shortly after lift-off:

You can see the hang gliding center in the background.  The big green thing behind the glider is a hill that's used for practicing.  I managed to crash a glider on that very same hill just hours before this picture was taken!  And if you look closely, at the top of the hill and over to the left is a little white house.  There's a wooden bench up there where you can sit in the semi-shade and see a beautiful view of the October leaves.  That might be my new happy place.

Anyway, this stage of the flight was the scariest for me.  I was getting used to the idea that I was just hanging in a sling.  Sure, there were leg loops in the harness, but it wasn't as snug as I would have expected.

Here's the first picture that was taken after the ultralight plane detached itself from the glider:

We're above New Hampshire here, but across the river in the background is Vermont:

Getting up to this elevation took some skill, so the tandem guy took care of it.  Once we were gliding, though, I took the helm.  Here I am, learning to fly in circles:

Here's a photo that I only post because you can see the happy bench location that I liked sitting in in the lower left corner:

So...I dunno, here is a selection of my favorite shots.  Hang gliding montage!

 I'm pretty sure the following shot was taken during the most fun part of the hang gliding trip, when we stalled the glider and let it fall, then sped it up to rise back out of the dive.  That was great. :-)

Here's a photo with a good view of the funny bag that the tandem pilot was in:

Near the end, we got a photo with the landing strip in the background:

Hang gliding was peaceful.  It's very different from sky diving.  Sky diving is crazy and surreal, because you are falling out of the sky straight towards the ground.  Hang gliding is more like being a bird, soaring over the landscape.  You can even catch thermals, like birds do, and ride the updraft.  The tandem instructor once stayed up for 6 hours by catching thermals!

Another interesting difference between hang gliding and sky diving: with sky diving, after trying a tandem, I really wanted to try it without a person attached to me.  Probably because I wanted to get the most surreal experience possible by jumping out of a perfectly functional plane of my own free will, without a tandem instructor pushing me.  With hang gliding, however, I had no such desire.  I was happy to have a tandem instructor deal with the technical difficulties of navigating the glider up to altitude and landing the glider at the end.  Both of those parts of the flight looked very difficult.  With a tandem glide, I got to skip the stress and just enjoy being a bird!