On Sunday we drove up to Wrightwood for the zipline tour. The tour was a little pricey, but the description sounded exciting enough and promised 3.5 hours of adventure.
We ate at a little cafe in the town where my dad had some of the best french fries of his life.
Our tour was delayed by about twenty minutes because two blondes (and one of their husbands) came late. We weren’t sure, but it seemed like they’d been drinking a little before showing up, and their “rowdiness” up in the forest was appropriate for some level of inebriation.
After a quick bumpy jaunt up the hill in a modified van we were being schooled in zipline safety and technique by the guides. Strangely this zipline differed greatly from the ones we’d been on (Sam and I in Thailand and my parents in Ohio).
As we proceeded through the course we were constantly castigated for getting these techniques wrong, or even for being mistaken for someone else that had got it wrong in our group. Sam was always told she was now doing good because the guide confused her with someone that had come in too fast before. My mother had trouble with the “stopping” mechanism, which was an asinine system of burning your gloved hand on the actual zipline to slow yourself down. Even in Thailand they’re smart enough to use physics to design a zipline so momentum, gravity and mass do the slowing for you… not your hand… My crime? I uncrossed my legs once. Apparently on THIS zipline you have to pretend you’re on a waterslide… no twirling or waving or anything like that. None of the fun stuff you’d associate with a zipline elsewhere.
Still, we still managed to have a little fun. I liked the long “scary” bridges over the canyons and wished we could have stayed up there even more. It was really strange since normally I’m slightly afraid of heights.
On the way back we had to drive north before coming back down around the national forest. We discovered an area with some great rock formations, and I couldn’t help but scramble up one of the smaller ones. I later learned these are called the “mormon rocks.”
We headed back to LA, stopped at pa-ord noodles for dinner and then had ice cream before mom and dad retired for the night.
