After the Sea, There's the Sun and Wind
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After a morning of solitary tide pool adventures, Robb and I took the bikes out to Cesar Chavez park in Berkeley and found a nice spot to fly our stunt kite.
It generally takes two able-bodied people to launch one of these kites, so Robb and I have to be creative. I usually do the tossing-the-kite-in-the-air bit, while Robb sits in the seat of his fancy recumbent trike. The ground at this park is riddled with ground squirrel burrows, and if Robb is concentrating on the sky, his balance isn't so great. The only downside is that while on the trike, Robb can't really back up (bicycles are only geared to pedal forward, after all), so he doesn't have the same control over the kite that I do.
I'm not sure how we managed to leave one of the kites' tails at home, but it didn't seem to make a big difference. I suspect the main purpose of the tail is to make the kite look really cool when it is looping around the sky.
It is really remarkable how fun this kind of kite flying is, once you get the hang of it. When we started, we crashed the kite repeatedly, tangled the two strings, and got really frustrated. Now we're feeling like we're figuring out how to coax the kite into doing what we want. We're not great, by any stretch of the imagination, but we have fun doing as much as we can.
After a morning of solitary tide pool adventures, Robb and I took the bikes out to Cesar Chavez park in Berkeley and found a nice spot to fly our stunt kite.
It generally takes two able-bodied people to launch one of these kites, so Robb and I have to be creative. I usually do the tossing-the-kite-in-the-air bit, while Robb sits in the seat of his fancy recumbent trike. The ground at this park is riddled with ground squirrel burrows, and if Robb is concentrating on the sky, his balance isn't so great. The only downside is that while on the trike, Robb can't really back up (bicycles are only geared to pedal forward, after all), so he doesn't have the same control over the kite that I do.
I'm not sure how we managed to leave one of the kites' tails at home, but it didn't seem to make a big difference. I suspect the main purpose of the tail is to make the kite look really cool when it is looping around the sky.
It is really remarkable how fun this kind of kite flying is, once you get the hang of it. When we started, we crashed the kite repeatedly, tangled the two strings, and got really frustrated. Now we're feeling like we're figuring out how to coax the kite into doing what we want. We're not great, by any stretch of the imagination, but we have fun doing as much as we can.
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