What do most twenty-four-year-olds say when they get asked what they want for their birthday? Honestly, sitting here, I can’t really even venture a guess, because I am so unlike most other twenty-four-year-olds! I asked for a kite. It probably seems like that’s the sort of thing that someone who was turning four and not twenty-four would dream of, but that’s only because most twenty-four-year-olds haven’t seen the kite that I wanted.
Yeah, that’s the kite I got, only mine is blue, not rainbow colored and it’s awesome.
Obviously, having an amazing stunt kite is a great dating tool. It’s a one-time expense that makes for many free, exciting, and unique dates. Naturally, I decided to immediately employ my new tool. The first day I had the chance to use it was the Saturday after my birthday. I decided to first try it out on my friend Candie. She’s always up for some fun, and if things don’t go well, she’s just a friend, so I won’t loose points with her. It wasn’t really windy enough, but we still had a ton of fun. We flew it up on the quad field on campus, and we would start at one end and run across to get enough wind. We flew it for about forty-five minutes then she had to leave. I decided that I wanted to keep flying it, so I sent a text to my friend Haley and invited her to come fly with me. She was excited to, and we tried flying it in a different field. The wind was better, but still not great. We had some fun, but with a kite as amazingly fun as this one, we were nowhere near the full fun potential.
I had an idea about how to increase the fun and the wind: fly the kite out of the back of my truck! But I was hesitant to suggest it seriously because I couldn’t think of a good road to do it on. That’s where Haley saved the day. When I jokingly suggested we try flying it sitting on the tailgate of my 4Runner while one of us drives it, she suggested we do it out on the farm roads outside of time! BRILLIANT! Haley’s overall coolness assessment score pretty much doubled in that moment. We packed up and headed west, just like the pioneers… amazingly awesome kite pioneers!
The road from 200 N that heads to Benson was perfect. We set it up, but I realized that we were heading the wrong direction for the wind that was already blowing, so I grabbed the kite, and we just drove to the other end of the road. When I went to set it up again, I learned a valuable lesson, IT IS ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA TO TAKE THE TIME TO WIND UP THE STRINGS PROPPERLY. After getting the strings untangled, I got the kite airborne, and Haley started to drive slowly. I ran and jumped onto the tailgate, and we were flying!
So, I started thinking about where I was, flying a kite out of the back of a moving truck, and I realized that this was the happiest moment I have had in quite a while. I had an amazingly talented and attractive girl driving, I had an amazingly fun kite flying, and I had amazingly funny looks from the people who passed us as we drove at 1/4th the posted speed limit. It was just amazing any way you look at it.
