Countdown to RTW: One Month!

It's now 2012 — the year I'll travel the world.

I'm incredibly excited, but also freaked out that my trip is happening so soon! My townhouse lease ends on January 31, so I have less than a month to get rid of my furniture, car and other crap, buy all the travel stuff I need, tie up loose ends, pack and be ready to go.

I should also buy a plane ticket to New Zealand at some point, right?

Luckily I thrive under the pressure of a looming deadline — I was a journalism major who loved to hammer out all her stories at the last minute — and the fact that my departure is now in sight is such an incentive to get movin'.

It's starting to feel real.


A NEW FRIEND, PLUS BONUS TRAVEL GEAR

I ended 2011 with a few fun activities that didn't directly relate to travel planning.

Last week, I met up with a Seattle Twitter friend, Mindi, for coffee at the lovely new Milstead & Co. in Fremont. Mindi is a proud member of the green-aproned mafia (works for Starbucks) and shared with me her plentiful coffee expertise, of which I have approximately none.

We also chatted about running, traveling, blogging and more. It was a delightful meetup on a rainy afternoon. I love it when an Internet friend becomes a real-life friend!

Mindi also generously gave me several Eagle Creek packing cubes and a small camera bag left over from her days of frequent travel as a sports journalist. Score! Thank you, Mindi!


ENDING THE YEAR ON A HIGH NOTE

The last activity I did in 2011 was pretty cool — I flew!

My dad and I spent an afternoon at iFLY Seattle, where a powerful vertical wind tunnel simulates the experience of skydiving. I've been skydiving twice before, but I was still a little nervous to jump into the 90+ mile/hour wind at iFLY!

My dad reserved our flights ahead of time, and we arrived plenty early to check in and watch other fliers in action. About 30 minutes before our flights, we watched a brief instructional video and learned hand signals from an instructor. Then we each got geared up with a flight suit, goggles, earplugs and a helmet.

Once it's time to fly, each person jumps into the wind for one minute while the instructor helps position his or her body correctly. If you're too stiff, don't keep your chin up or don't have your arms and legs spread just so, you fall to the bottom rather than fly up high.

It's more difficult than it looks!

My dad had trouble breathing through his nose, so he kept his mouth open. The high-speed wind caused him to make some pretty funny faces!

We each flew twice for a total of two minutes. You can also pay more for longer periods of flight, but I had plenty of fun in just two minutes.

The instructor told me that iFLY is actually more difficult than real skydiving, and I thought the two experiences felt completely different. I'd say that if you're afraid to jump out of a plane but still want to fly, definitely try indoor skydiving. At $60 for a standard session, it's also much more affordable than a $200+ real skydive.

If you have the guts and the funds, though, go for the real thing! There's nothing quite like free-falling down to the earth. There's also nothing quite like the sense of relief you feel the moment that parachute opens. : )


MORE ADVENTURES AHEAD

I hope to do lots of fun stuff throughout my travels, although I'm good on skydiving for a while and don't know if I have the guts to try bungee jumping — eek! Extreme activities also tend to be the most expensive, so I want to pick and choose wisely.

I'm definitely going to go ZORB globe riding in New Zealand, though. How can I pass up the chance to roll down a hill in a giant plastic bubble??

I'm also open to suggestions. Be sure to let me know about any activities I MUST try as I make my way around the world!

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Oahu Through Aaron's Lens

OK, folks. Yesterday's photo post was amateur hour compared to this one.

Here are some of Aaron's best photos from Hawaii. So amazing! You can check out more at Aaron Pass Photography.

Click any photo to view a larger size. (The one of the little girl near the bottom... I die every time I see it. Ahh!)

Self-portrait while skydiving! The veins!

Just ridiculous. And I get to learn photography from this guy.

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New here?

• Here's the lowdown on My Story
• You can add Answering Oliver to your feed reader
• Feel free to subscribe to Answering Oliver by email
  
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• Or just hang out. That's cool, too.

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Tequila shots that don't kill you will only make you stronger

What I failed to mention in my skydiving post was the violent ear-popping I experienced while hurtling through the air toward certain death. It didn't occur to me that this would happen, but in hindsight it makes perfect sense.

It didn't detract too much from the amazing overall experience, but I had a headache for the rest of the night. I was also completely exhausted — all the heart-racing anticipation, last-minute adrenaline pumping and insane flipping through the air while free-falling can do that to you. So I went to bed around 9:00 that night, content to sleep in and take it easy the following day.

Just kidding! I did go to bed early, but got up at 7 a.m. on Sunday to the sound of buckets of rain pounding the skylights above my bed. We had a 5K to run, people!

Don and I dressed for a theme we thought appropriate for the Fremont Oktoberfest Brew HA-HA 5K: partying! His subtle-yet-effective shirt is from the 70s; my "This Girl Can Party" shirt was purchased at the mall shortly before my 21st birthday specifically to make my mom cringe.

It totally worked.

It rained so violently the entire way to Fremont that we thought the 5K run/walk might morph into a swim/paddle. Luckily the storm subsided right as Don, my mom and I parked the car. God smiled on Fremont that day, and the sun even started shining later on as the beer garden festivities kicked off.

Don had been training for this 5K for months and left my mom and I behind right away, as expected (he finished in 28:15). I stuck with my mom until about two-thirds of the way through the race; then, at her vehement encouragement, I pulled ahead to finish on my own. She came in a mere two minutes (35:34) behind me.

There were several people dressed up in Oktoberfest outfits, plus a trio of true American patriots (crazy wigs, shorty American-flag shorts, cropped tops with beer bellies on full display). Then there was the very talented guy who dribbled two basketballs while running the entire 3.1 miles; the group of guys dressed like Ghostbusters; the guy who ran in a full polar-bear suit to raise awareness for... something; and the guy who ran only wearing a sheer, pink thong.

The front view of the latter was beyond horrifying. Watch this video and check him out 25 seconds in.

I was definitely not one of the top finishers, but I thought I had a decent time (33:32) for my first 5K and for sticking with my mom most of the way when I probably could have gone faster. I have not always liked to run, and in fact have hated it more often than I've enjoyed it, but this was a lot of fun. I'm already working on running faster for the next 5K (or two) that I'm planning to do near the end of October.

It ain't where you start, but where you end up! Which brings me to the tequila story.

Over the summer, I played on a softball team. I was also working out more than I ever had before and building up unprecedented strength and endurance (for me). I could do — get this! — an all-time personal best of four consecutive push-ups. I was pretty darn proud of that.

One evening, during a post-win celebration with the team at the Ravenna Alehouse, I was gifted with a few shots of tequila by a creepy nice man as a thank-you for getting out of his way as he played pool (I was sitting directly in the way of most of his shots). My enablers teammates encouraged me to accept these gifts, and I did.

I can get a bit competitive after a few drinks, and, in the great tradition of Festivus-style Feats of Strength, I have been known to challenge people to arm wrestling matches. Usually I challenge someone who is much, much stronger than me, with the full knowledge that I will lose. But everyone likes to pull for the underdog, right?

This evening in particular, I decided to challenge a much-stronger (i.e. male) teammate to a push-up competition. After all, I had four solid push-ups in my arsenal! How could I go wrong?

I shocked everyone, including myself, by knocking out 12 push-ups before I collapsed. My opponent not only kept going, but started doing one-handed push-ups just to rub it in.

Defeat aside, I've interpreted this event as irrefutable scientific evidence that tequila makes me 3X stronger. Obviously.

However, tequila is inherently evil, and I now refuse to drink it (or shots of any kind, actually). The stench alone is repulsive, and only bad things (or really fun things — but mostly bad) come of its consumption. Leo Babauta of Zen Habits even includes this fact on his list of 20 Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting Out in Life (item #18).

Instead, I've turned to a different method to improve my upper-body strength and my ability to do push-ups. Enter the One Hundred Push-ups training program. I found out about it — where else? — via the Art of Non-Conformity, where I read that Chris Guillebeau had managed to do 100 consecutive push-ups "by doing the final exercises in the Ulaan Bataar airport in Mongolia this summer, waiting to fly back to Korea."

Naturally.

My living room is a little less exotic than Ulaan Bataar, but it works just as well for doing push-ups. Before starting the program, I could only do three (with great, great effort). Now, at the end of week two, I can do eight solid push-ups. No tequila required!

I've got a long way to go until I reach 100 push-ups, but where you end up is much more important than where you start. And starting something is always much more effective than just thinking about it and doing nothing.

I don't want to be able to do 100 push-ups just for the bragging rights. I want to be able to 100 push-ups because it seems, to me, to be impossible.

I know from experience — from paying off my debt, for example — that once you accomplish something that you previously thought was impossible, the world becomes a much less scary, much more fun place to live.

Hurtling through the air toward certain death

Oh, man. Crazy weekend. Where to begin?

Wait, not here! Gotta back up first.

I went skydiving with my brother, Brandon, and my mom's boyfriend, Don, on Saturday evening. We had originally scheduled to skydive last Sunday, but the weather was horrible and erratic — dumping rain one minute, kind of clearing up the next, then dumping rain again.

Luckily, Saturday's weather was perfect. The sky was completely clear and the temp was in the mid-70s. It felt like an awesome July day.

I spent the morning touring Woodinville wineries with my recently engaged friends who are searching for a wedding venue, so that took my mind off of being nervous for the skydive. Then I took a nap, which I attribute directly to the flu shot I had gotten on Friday. Right when I woke up, it was time to head to Snohomish. No time to be nervous!

The atmosphere at Skydive Snohomish is very relaxed, which I think is crucial for jumpy people like me. Music and skydiving videos were playing while we paid and signed our lives away — pages and pages of initialing statements like, "I acknowledge that skydiving is DANGEROUS and EXPERIMENTAL and that I may be SEVERELY INJURED or KILLED."

I'm not kidding — they were very generous with the caps-lock key.

Then we watched a brief video, which walked us through what we would be doing. I was all good until it got to the part where you actually jump out of the plane — it turns out that you and your tandem instructor scoot on your butts over to the open door, and then you have to hook your legs under the plane and wait for your instructor to go "one, two, three!" before he shoves you both out.

I'm sorry... HOOK my LEGS under the PLANE? I'm not sure why that really freaked me out, but it did.

We went outside and did a little practice arching our bodies, which is apparently the optimum position for hurtling through the air toward certain death.

Then it was time to put on our sweet jumpsuits and get harnessed up.

My instructor was a jolly fellow from England named Spotty. Yes, Spotty. That's not his real name, but that's how he introduced himself, so I was hoping that it wasn't his skydiving skills that were spotty. He was a cool guy and kept me relaxed and informed of what we would be doing at all times, which I really appreciated.

He also encouraged me to do jazz hands during freefall, which I totally did!

Once we were ready to go, it was right out to the little plane. The sun was about to set and we had to be back on the ground by the time it went down. Again, no time to be nervous, thank goodness!

We all sat on the floor of the plane — no seats, obviously — in between each other's legs. The flight was beautiful — about 10 or 15 minutes of flying up to 13,500 feet, with awesome views of the mountains and Puget Sound. This part wasn't very scary, either, since Spotty kept chatting me up about wineries and other random stuff.

When we were almost to the right elevation, Spotty strapped me to him really tightly and put my little hat and goggles on. It felt really safe and secure. Then the door opened and I watched two groups jump before me — Don with his instructor first, then another guy with his instructor.

It's really, really weird to watch people fall out of the plane you're in.

Suddenly it was our turn. We scooted to the door and I instinctively grabbed the right side of the opening, which was immediately nixed by Spotty. I was supposed to hold onto my harness, which I did, as I HOOKED my LEGS under the PLANE — my first "HOLY S#!T!" moment, but not as scary as I thought it would be. Then it was "one, two, three!" and out we went.

At first we were not level. We were freakin' headfirst, sideways, all over the place. I was screaming and freaking out, but having a lot of fun, and did I mention freaking out? Once we got into the correct position (see above, on the grass) the freefall felt much more controlled. And it didn't even feel like falling because it didn't seem like the ground was getting all that closer.

Spotty was making swimming motions with his hands and laughing, and I was doing jazz hands and realizing that I should keep my mouth shut (i.e. stop screaming) so that I could actually breathe and not have tons of air rushing into my throat.

I was also trying to look at the horizon and not just stare at the ground, but it was hard to hold my head up since it felt like Spotty's chest was right above my head. Apparently we were in freefall for about a minute, but it felt like it went by so much faster.

I was really, really glad when the parachute opened (for many reasons!), since I got to relax a little and stop completely freaking out. I was able to take my goggles off and look around more, and Spotty had me hold on to the handles that controlled the parachute. He showed me how to pull on them to go left or right, and he did some pretty scary, fast turns. I was happy to hang and chill and look around without the deathly whipping around that some of the other skydivers were doing.

I was shaking and in awe the entire time. I kept saying, "Holy s#!t!" and "Wow, this is crazy!" because it really, really was. Who jumps out of planes?! Who does this every day?!

The landing was the last semi-scary part, but Spotty really knew what he was doing and told me exactly when to lift my legs up to avoid viciously breaking them. We slid to the ground harmlessly on our bottoms, and I couldn't stop laughing. Spotty captured the moment perfectly when he said: "Welcome to skydiving — the sky is now your playground."

I've perused many lists of people's lifelong goals around the Internets, and skydiving pops up on most of them. If you're thinking of going, do it! If you live near a reputable skydiving facility, the only obstacles to overcome are lack of money, lack of time and lack of will.

I've decided to make new experiences and adventures a priority in my life, so the decision to dedicate some money and time to skydiving was really easy. As for will, I was much more scared to jump off a bridge last summer than I was to jump out of a plane last night. I've come a long way, baby.

Life is crazy like that.