CalActive.com Activities Blog

I definitely have the best friends in the world. When I moved to Laguna Beach from London as a newlywed, a few of them clubbed together and got us a helicopter trip over LA - can you think of a better gift?! It was such a great way to experience our new ‘homeland’ and to check out the area from the sky - Los Angeles is such a massive and sprawling city, it can be quite difficult to get your head around how it all fits together, so this was perfect. We flew from Long Beach and were up in the air for about an hour, flying over the Queen Mary and then up the coast past all the famous beaches that I’d heard about all my life (I nearly dislocated my neck whilst trying to see the bodybuilders at Venice Beach. Very disappointing), over Beverly Hills, Hollywood - I nearly peed my pants with excitement when I found myself eye-to-eye with the inimitable Hollywood sign - and then over downtown (where we flew so close to the skyscrapers that I could actually see in the windows on the 30th (?) floor and eyeball all the penpushers pretending to be working hard whilst looking at naughty pictures on the Internet)…then we were swooping along the freeways and over the crazy cement flyovers and bridges (I was flirting with cardiac arrest by this stage, as the pure scale of the metropolis that is LA was suddenly starting to sink in) and eventually back to Long Beach where we buzzed a container ship as we were heading back to the airport. Absolutely fantastic, an unforgettable experience. Thanks my darlings. Oh, and Woof, with regards to your comment (’Next time I want you to fly it. Get married again and we’ll organise the lessons. Get married AGAIN and we’ll buy you a chopper’) - I have no intentions of multiple matrimony, but I do happen to have found a fellow boarderwho also happens to Fly Her Own Helicopter, so if I do ever find myself going Elizabeth Taylor-stylie, I may have someone for you to pay for my lessons.

In my next life I am going to be a helicopter pilot. Respect to fellow boarder Chopperchick, who is living my dream (I live vicariously through her fantastic blog). I’ve been lucky enough to have done two helicopter trips in my short life (okay, not that short, but let me at least pretend): one over Cape Town and one over Los Angeles, and I absolutely loved them both. The Cape Town one was a few years back and was a breathtakingly scenic flight around the peninsula of the Western Cape with the opportunity to view both the unique wonder of Table Mountain as well as the World Heritage Site of Robben Island. I grew up in and around Cape Town and thought that I knew the Mother City (as she is affectionately called) and surrounds like the back of my hand, but seeing it from the air gives a totally unique perspective, one that I will never forget. It was brilliant! I’ll write about the Los Angeles helicopter trip in another blog but for now wanted to post these pics of the Cape Town trip. I found a video of someone doing a similar flight but be warned: it is really shaky and I ended up feeling sick – ironic that I didn’t experience any motion sickness whatsoever in the chopper, but that sitting here on terra firma, watching that video, I thought I was going to do a Jaeson-on-top-of-the-mountain stunt. The only thing that distracted me from thoughts of barfing was the look of pure terror on the face of the kid in the video. Perhaps I should start doing some helicopter flying lessons…