Category: Real World Northern California

So, if you’re a Corbett Publishing Patreon member you might have read how Emma drops Toureq/Shadow Walker off at a small airport cafe in Dragon Girl Book 3 and, in the upcoming book six of Gold Valley mysteries, 🪂 Parachutes and Peril, there’s a tiny airport where a skydiving party goes very wrong.

The real version of that airport was only a mile or so from my house as a kid: the Lodi Airport.  

It’s actually between Lodi and Galt, in an amorphous area that is part of the town of Acampo. Which means “country” or “camp” in Spanish — not to be confused with El Campo, which is another small town in California. 

We lived so close that skydivers would sometimes land in our yard. We had two acres, that was really open. When we drove home from Lodi or Stockton (which is totally so the basis for Dredgetown), we’d see colorful parachutes dotting the sky. There is also a small cafe beside the airport.

When I was in middle school and high school, a lot of the neighbors and people in the area got rid of their cows and started putting in grapes… and well, Lodi has always been wine country. I mean, they had the Lodi Grape Festival. So these scenes are grounded in my childhood and my teens. 

In 2013…so, I guess I was 29, I took the plunge and jumped out of a plane. I had no kiddos, and I had talked with some friends about doing it. So, I made a Facebook event (forgot to invite the husband), and *magically* all but one of the friends who said they wanted to do it bailed. 

When I told my husband what we were doing that day, he told me I was crazy, then totally went along with it. 

He was surprised when our friend Rob and his parents showed up. Rob was on the Facebook event, haha.

I watched the “Fast Pre Jump Class” as it’s billed on their website, which was a video from the 80s saying that they were allowed to have the parachuting under an experimental program that would be ending in the 1989. This was 2013. So clearly, the video had not been updated. And I walked out of there remembering to be a banana when we were in free fall. 

Took some pictures in front of the plane, went in the plane, sat straddling a bench with my instructor right behind me and my photographer right in front of me. We were all smooshed together. The little plane took off. My friend was two people behind me (my instructor guy who I would be clipped to and his photographer). 

And well, I had that anxious feeling in my stomach like Emma gets. This is totally safe, right?

Can you tell by my face how I felt? Uncertain, worried, eager? The same feeling I had when I was getting on the plane to Argentina, and hadn’t heard from the English school I was supposed to be teaching at in a couple months… The feeling like I was making a mistake or setting off on a great adventure and I wasn’t sure which. Have you had that feeling? 

Anyway, by that point, there really wasn’t any backing out. And I leaped into the adventure, or rather the instructor slowly tipped us out of the plane. 

Thumbs up, we survived. I am a superhero now or what?