@TheFarmMusic: “Hey Matt … you up for ziplining w/ us tomorrow at Fontanel?
@mattwilliams615: “Absolutely.”
That was about it… a quick Twitter message had gotten me into a last-minute adventure with The Farm. I love those guys and had never been ziplining, so how could I say no? I had no idea what to expect, but it sure sounded fun!
It started with me, the band, and a bunch of strangers who quickly became friends. We were to be the first civilians on the newly installed lines, which will be open to the public tomorrow (5/3). And as we were being informed of this, a guy called Lunchbox walked up with a cast on his leg… awesome. (The cast was unrelated to ziplining, Lunchbox just happened to have impeccable timing.)
After we harnessed up – enjoying far too many jokes about how these things fit around the male anatomy – we were off, our fearless leaders Michael and Kevin from AdventureWorks at the helm. Along with figuring out the intricacies of the new course, Michael worked on his standup routine to make patrons laugh. Many jokes were thrown out.
Obviously only one person can go at a time, but you also need to prevent against zipping before the person in front of you is completely unhooked. Otherwise, the center of gravity shifts, the person who went first begins to go backwards, people collide, calamity ensues, etc. To make sure this didn’t happen, we needed a safe word to shout out informing the others that we were off the line. I’m not sure how this happened, but somehow we ended up at “pineapple farm.” Therefore, we spent the next couple hours shouting “pineapple farm” across the forest at Fontanel, having come up with our new favorite twitter #hashtag.
Damien from The Farm is scared of heights by the way… so we took great pleasure in filming his prepubescent girl-like screams. Speaking of which, there was an eight-year-old named Jessica in the group as well. She was a rock star.
She was also a tiny little thing, and at one point she wasn’t quite heavy enough to make it all the way to the end. As Michael tried finding a stick long enough to hand her, about 10 of us held on to the end of the line to shift the center of gravity. Because the lines are made out of some fairly durable steal, this killed our hands, so Damien thought it wise to strap back onto the line with his harness… guess what happened. (No worries, we stopped him and Michael grabbed Jess) That was the only potential mishap of the day, although it turned out fairly entertaining.
Ziplining is nothing but pure fun. Even if you’re terrified of heights, at no point do you feel unsafe. In fact, I dare someone to frown while they are doing it. Impossible. Eventually, there will be eight lines on the course. We only did six, as the other two weren’t perfected yet. We did get to ride the longest one though, spanning 850 feet, and high enough to actually go over another one.
I’ll take this opportunity to shamelessly and relentlessly plug the entire experience. I had never seen Fontanel in its entirety; it’s gorgeous. Ziplining is a riot, and the guys at AdventureWorks were splendid. At one point I was flying so fast and high that I started to giggle (probably in a way similar to Damien’s screaming). I would recommend a full day at Fontanel to anyone.
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