Skydive and Helicopter Ride

I have always wanted to skydive. It has been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember. It's one of those things that I always talk about doing, but I never made any effort to actually do it. I think it is the one thing on my list that sounds so exciting and incredible, but that truly terrifies me, so much so, that I think deep down I sort of thought I would never actually do it.

Well, when we were researching things to do in Cairns, skydiving kept coming up as a top thing to do, so we decided to take the jump. I spent weeks, researching statistics and convincing myself that I wasn't going to die. My heart would beat so fast everytime I thought about it, especially the night before as I struggled to sleep instead of praying over and over again, "Please God, don't let me die skydiving."

On Monday morning, we got picked up at 6:30am, and drove to the skydive shop. We filled out the paper work, which included statements like, "There is an element of luck involved with skydiving" Once we turned our paperwork in we found out they didn't have enough photo/video guys for us to go on the first jump, so they told us to chill for an hour and we would be going on the second jump. We went for a walk around Cairns, came back, watched the instructional video, got in the bus, and as we were driving to the jump site, a call came in that the winds had picked up and the jump was being postponed. We hung out for another hour, before they told us that the we wouldn't get to go. So instead of our adrenaline packed morning, we did this instead:

I couldn't believe it! After all the stress and anxiety, we didn't even get to do it. After that HUGE disappointment, we moved on to the second part of the day... a helicopter ride out to the Great Barrier Reef. It was Nic's first time in a helicopter and he loved it! It was so incredible to view the reef from the sky and see how many different individual reefs make up the GBR. The colors were just gorgeous and we all agreed that we could have easily spent another hour flying around.

Once we landed, we were ferried over to the boat to spend the afternoon on ______ Reef. They did a fish feeding and we got to see a giant Maori Wrasse, which I had been hoping to see. Then we went out snorkeling and saw some beautiful coral, tons of colorful fish, giant clams and a turtle. After snorkeling we enjoyed a traditional Australian lunch, before the rough ride back to Cairns and a relaxing Italian dinner in Palm Cove.