Vicarious Thoughts

20. fly a kite

Today, we headed down to the park today with two kites. One is a very cheap kite reminiscent of the one I remember from when I flew my first kite (and wound up chasing after in an overgrown field) and required a little tweaking before it would fly and a inexpensive and better quality kite made of ripstop with oversewn seams and pockets.

I had forgotten how exhilarating it is to fly a kite! The ripstop kite was definitely my hands-down favourite of the two and was the easier to launch (just hold onto the string close to the kite and let it out as the wind catches the kite). We strung some expensive, what I’m guessing is, builder’s string that got put in the basket on a hardware shopping expedition by a certain small person and that worked well and only caused a bit of drag when I let the string right out.
The last kite I flew was a big (1.5m long?) box kite I made from scratch for our school’s kite day way back when I was 12ish. Today brought back the memory of the pride and excitement of getting something in the air.
Sam had a great time too – though she found the fact you can crash a kite by out chasing it a little frustrating. She did really well though – not only handling the ripstop kite with relative ease but also managing to keep the plastic kite up in the air for a really long time (way longer than I can recall from when I was her age anyway).
After some time she decided the nearby playground held more enticement than the kites and I had a 1/2 hour of fun by myself with the ripstop kite.
I definitely want to try out a stunt kite now and I know we’ll be back to the park with kites in the near future!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 4th, 2010 at 10:03 am and is filed under 101 in 1001. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.