Once upon a time....

I realized that I never got back to the story from the weekend when I got to fly thanks to my brother's interest in aviation. So here it is, with a few interesting anecdotes and pictures. We made a six-hour journey to get to SIU in Carbondale, close to the southern border of Illinois. And guess how brilliant I acted that weekend? First of all, I was supposed to leave for home Friday afternoon after my classes, so that we could all drive up together for this career fair on Saturday. But instead, I got done with classes, and waited, and procastinated, and procrastinated, until I finally got yelled at 11 p.m. to drive back home immediately. I finally left my dorm at midnight, and made it home at 2 a.m., just in time to start the arduous roadtrip to Carbondale. I ended up going without sleep for over 24 hours that day, my second all-nighter in this lifetime. Phew!!... :-P

So we finally made it to our destination at 8:30 a.m., and got my brother registered for flying with the university pilots. I joked about flying with my brother, and they seriously signed me up for the ride too! So leaving out all the minor interesting stories, we basically flew in a glider (seen in the pics below) at over 2300 ft!! And I clicked pics of the bird's eye view while my brother handled the controls as per the pilot's instructions. But it wasn't mind-blowing until the pilot started playing zero-gravity tricks! He dived the glider nose down in a free-fall condition, so that all of us (including the papers on my lap) inside where being pushed away from the earth with equal force, just as Newton's third law of motion would have predicted. But boy, oh boy, that was some scary adventure. For a second, I was afraid that my heart was going to fly off into the space haha....


And once the two-three rounds of zero-gravity were over, I began to feel air-sick. I was glad that it was time to land and get back on the comfortable earth. Soon after landing, my brother and parents went on for a campus tour while I pulled out my books and started solving exercises with a weary head. My family returned after three hours of touring, and decided to head back after having some lunch. It was now time for the dreadfully long reverse road-trip, but we switched drivers and navigators every two hours, and even my brother was permitted to drive on his driver's permit. The confidence of being able to land a glider successfully and weary family members who could not hold up the argument worked to his advantage of taking over the driver's seat.

It was 7 p.m. when our exhausted family finally reached home. We were all glad for a productive day, good family time in the car, and more than anything, coming back to the comfort of home.