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A Christmas Story - Part 1

Neil Amonson, shares his KAVU version of Christmas spirit!

By KAVU

January 18^th, 2017

This is a Christmas story

....but not your usual Christmas story.

What it does include is a good old fashioned road trip, some parachutes, and a bit of luck.

This year, Maureen and I decided to get creative and make most of our time off work between Christmas and New Years.

Ruling out driving to Valle de Bravo (something like 1.5 days in the car just to get there), we set our eyes on the Baja coast.

Only 11 hours from Salt Lake city is a little town called La Salinas which, had everything we wanted to call the trip a success: a beach, warmish air, awesome views and with a bit of luck from mother nature, some paragliding.

Following Christmas, we would drive up the California coast, flying along the way with the goal of being in San Francisco for New Years.

Then we would drive back to Salt Lake City.

The following photos and words show some of the highlights of our trip which, worked out just the way it was supposed to......

Perfectly!

Winter in Utah is great

The flying is actually pretty good too, it’s just super cold.

One of the main goals of this trip was to go fly somewhere warm, hence - destination Mexico.

gear up!

We ended up bringing 2 paragliders, 3 skydiving rigs, and a tent.

And of course we had to bring some sombreros.

If you look closely, you can see the neighbors cat napping in my clothes pile while I was organizing "trip stuff".

I guess he wanted to come too.

I picked up Maureen from work at 3pm on December 23rd.

She had everything she needed neatly packed in one small bag.

I was impressed.

KAVU Boulder Duffel available here.

First leg of the trip was 10 hours to the border crossing just south of San Diego.

We arrived at the border crossing in San Ysidro around 1am, in the middle of a huge rainstorm and high winds.

There was not a single car in front of us as we pulled up to the customs agents, answered a few basic questions and continued on our way.

They didn’t ask for any documents, including our passports which, I was surprised by.

We spent the night in Tijuana and headed south to La Salinas on Christmas Eve Morning.

Our accommodation was a small vintage airstream trailer on the beach.

Winds were high so we explored some of the local markets and had an awesome lobster dinner.

The forecast showed favorable winds and when we stuck our heads outside it looked like a nice flyable day.

We grabbed the tandem paraglider and walked 2 miles to the bottom of a coastal ridge.

We found the path which zigzagged its way up the 800 foot hill.

Along the way we were entertained by unique vegetation and awesome views.

NW93 Hat available here.

We found the primary launch spot without any issues and went to work fixing up some of the matting the locals leave up there to keep your lines from snagging on rocks and twigs.

They had been blown around by a recent storm but were pretty easy to put back in place.

Conditions were perfect for launching

.... we didn’t wait around and quickly got airborne.

If you look closely in the top left of the photo you can see one of the local vultures showing us the way.

We also flew with some hawks later that day.

Foam Dome Hat available here.

After about 30 minutes of ridge soaring the rocks under the cliff had heated up enough to start releasing thermals.

We found the lift smooth easy to stay in and climbed up to 2,000’ above launch.

Wanting to get a fun Christmas photo to send home we briefly removed our helmets and put on Santa hats.

I couldn’t believe how good the conditions were!

After flying around at cloud base for an hour, we headed to the beach to land and celebrate our awesome flight.

welcome crew

While putting our gear away, we were greeted by one of the local dogs.

He promptly laid down in the middle of the gear pile and hung out with us while we packed up the wing.

He must have been able to feel our buzz of contentment we had after such a fun flight, and we shared our happiness with him with generous ear scratching.