February 8th: Kite Flying Day

I now dislike whoever decided on this list of days. Why, oh why, did they decide to put Kite Flying Day at the beginning of February?! Granted, flying kites is fun. Especially in the summer, where it’s nice and sunny and warm. However, when it’s 0°C, and your fingers freeze off while you try to untangle the string, it’s not so great.
I rode up to the common, spent twenty minutes getting the strings sorted out, and then launched the kite. The strong winds pulled it straight up into the sky, and it soared through the crisp winter air, doing loops and spirals at the slightest pull from my expert hands… or not. There was no wind. BBC told me there was 8mph – force 3, I think. I would have called it a force 1, at most. After running backwards across almost the entire common, I still hadn’t succeeded in keeping it in the air for more than 10 seconds. Generally, it would lift off the ground, crumple, and come back down.
Normally, I’m not bad at kite flying. Dad’s the expert, but I can still do the basic loops, twists and figures of 8 well enough. No such luck today. Even when the wind perked up a bit a the end, there still wasn’t enough to do anything more than basic flying.
Not the most successful kite flying day ever. However, it did spark off a little idea. Basically, there’s a trick on the unicycle called gliding, where you take your feet off the pedals, and let your momentum carry you along, using one foot on the wheel to control your speed. It’s also possible to do this while being pulled along, by another unicyclist, or occasionally a car. So I figured, with a strong enough wind… kite pull gliding? Well, when it’s warmed up a bit…