Sarah and Matt at plane

As soon as we pulled in to the parking lot at West Plains Skydiving School, it seemed like people started coming out of everywhere.  They had been waiting for us to show up. We entered the building and we were greeted by Kash. He's a tandem instructor, but he was running manifest.  He gave us our waivers and another local checked our gear.

Exit / LeviWhen I was finished my waiver, I went to manifest and gave it to Kash plus $20 for the beer fund. We greatly appreciated them waiting for us to show up before calling it a day. Since we agreed to pay for two extra slots, I figured I'd ask for low passes. This would also save us some time.  Kash told me that I needed to pay for four full altitude jumps.  Hmmm...

Why exactly did I have to pay for full altitude for the two empty seats? This seemed just a little unreasonable, but I was over a barrel. The total on my credit card was  $111.24 - ugh.

After a quick stop at the restroom, I walked out to look at the landing area.  Kash was giving two other visiting jumpers - Levi & Mike - a drop zone briefing. There really wasn't much to see. West Plains Skydiving School has one of the smallest "main" landing areas I've ever seen. Not only was it small, but the obstacles surrounding the landing area made it less than ideal.  I was definitely not planning to over shoot. I didn't want to land in the jagged tar pile.

As we were gearing up, one of the visiting jumpers, Mike, thanked us for showing up. It turns out that Mike grew up in the Richmond area and graduated from VCU. It's such a small world!.  Mike also told us that they'd been unable to put up a load because they didn't have enough people.

Kara gave me the impression that they were doing us a favor by waiting, but if we had not show up, the plane would have remained on the ground. Needless to say, I felt a little bit like a sucker. Why didn't the others chip in to cover the extra slots? Why was the entire burden on us? Also, Kara told me that she would be covering one slot because we needed 10 to put up the plane, but there ended up being 8 jumpers on the load.  Oh well, we were getting to skydiving in Washington State.

Mike's 100th

We ended up doing an 8 way speed star to celebrate Mike's 100th jump. I was last out of the plane and made it in. Yay! I love this shot because you can see all 8 of us - including Kash who went low

West Plains Skydiving - Washington State

The picture below is a screen grab just before I landed. The dark patch on the right side is the jagged tar pile. I landed safely in the tall dry grass. I'm happy I didn't have to run out my landing - the ground was not level and I might have snapped an anlke.

West Plains Skydiving Landing Area

When we mentioned we were headed to Meadow Peaks Skydiving, the other woman from our jump - Renée Ryder - told us to say hello to Wayne - he's the DZO.  I got a chance to talk to her for a short while - she'd been over the place.  She even spent sometime training at Raeford in North Carolina and she has over 3,500 skydives! Awesome! 

My goal was to leave the DZ by 7:00 PM.  Before I started packing, I gave Levi my GoPro so he could get the video for Mike. I rushed through my pack job, took of my braces, and loaded the car. After a quick picture by the plane (taken by Renée), we were ready to go. It was 7:15 PM. According to the GPS, we were only 269 miles from Meadow Peak Skydiving. Time to get moving!