Introduction
My name is Adriaan, I am 22 years old and I live in the Netherlands.
For a quick overview of who I am, check the “About me” page here.

I am starting up this weblog to document my experiences while learning how to skydive!
This will serve multiple purposes. First of all: I imagine it will be fun to read these stories myself in say, a few years.
Second of all: It will probably be a good source of entertainment for you people!

I will be doing the AFF (Accelerated Free Fall)-course.
To learn more about the course, click here.
My course starts 15th of July and from then on I will post daily updates here.

But why fall out of an airplane on purpose?
I can think of multiple reasons actually! I will try and explain how I came to the decision about why I want to learn how to skydive.
This fascination is made up out of different interests. Some interests developed at an early age: for as long as I can remember I really enjoyed sticking my hand out of the window of a moving car to play with the wind rushing by. Or messing around with those controllable kites.
Later on I saw series like Band of Brothers in which paratroopers would jump out of planes behind enemy lines in France in 1944. I just had a bunch of admiration for doing something so daring.
Around age 15 I started to get interested in the weather. I enjoyed thunderstorms, watching the clouds and wanted to know how it all worked. Not too long ago I set up my automatic weather station (you can check it out here). I went up to those clouds in a few vacation flights and I started looking at planes as well. (Is the big picture beginning to show now?)
As might become apparent now, I have a bit of a geeky side. In the last few years I started to take general interest to physics. And in that period a guy I knew told me in detail about how he made a static line jump, and landed on an island, having a great view.
I then started connecting the dots.. it occurred to me that this was an activity that had it all:

• Wind flow
• A big controllable kite
• Paratrooper awesomeness
• Studying the clouds up close as an amateur meteorologist
• Airplanes
• Physics/aerodynamics, I mean it’s just amazing that you can fall out of a plane at 13.000 ft and that there’s this carefully engineered device that puts you back on the ground in one piece.
• A great view

Later, after I made my first and only tandem jump on Texel in August 2011 I found out there’s more:

• Adrenaline rush, feeling alive
• The serenity of floating around between the clouds
• Fun people!
• And a lot more (some are left to discover!)

So basically, that’s why I want to learn how to skydive!
And I hope you’ll be enjoying reading my updates