This appeared out of nowhere!
Sitting in the garden with a cup of tea on Thursday at Lourensford, I saw some tiny unusual movement above a tree in the distance.
This didn't look like a bird or a plane and so I grabbed the camera to set the zoom.
Of course this was the morning of the later stroke attack, but thankfully I took enough photos there for the next couple of days.
Let me show you!
This is what I saw, circled in yellow!
Ah! A guy in a parachute dropping down!
Wouldn't want him to land on top any of this!
I started getting better shots on the zoom.
Not a parachute, but a paraglider!
Another one! There were two of them!
Gliding graciously on the wind streams!
This was so amazing to see!
Now I know that many would ask what is paragliding and I found some history for those to read here.
In fact the army started it by towing a guy with an open parachute behind a truck, to rise up, in order to train them how to land with a parachute.
Check this out;
"The solution came with the invention of the ram-air parachute. Also known as the parafoil, it changed everything. Developed by Domina Jalbert in 1964, the ram-air parachute altered the shape of the chute from round to rectangular. The parachute -- called a wing or sail -- was broken up into cells. As the sail caught the wind, air would "ram" into these cells, filling up or inflating the sail. The shape allowed the wing to glide or float rather than immediately descend, as a traditional parachute would.
In 1978, three friends in Mieussy, France used their modified parachutes to jump off a mountainside and glide to the ground, the first time it had been done. This is considered the beginning of modern paragliding.
Paragliding equipment has evolved, with more complicated suspension and steering systems. Nevertheless, they're all based on Jalbert's original design. Extremely popular in Europe, paragliding is still a micro-sport in the United States, with around 5,000 or so participants [source: Becher]. However, it's climbing quickly in popularity."
Taken from:
https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/paragliding1.htm
Thank you for the visit to a post by @papilloncharity
@bearone