Zip line

Nick has always been one to build outrageous things. When I was 12 or so, Nick started getting really excited about having a zip line in our backyard. After he’d been talking about it for a week or so, Mom took him down to the hardware store.  They bought some cable, some cable clamps, a pulley, and some garden hose to use as padding. Nick took the handlebars off a tricycle and mounted the pulley on them. They looped one end of the cable around the swing set in the backyard, and the other end was threaded through the garden hose and wrapped around halfway up a tree in the middle of the backyard. A small rope was tied to the handlebars so we could send it back up to the top easily.

I’m sure it would have been an insurance nightmare if it had ever been found out, but the neighborhood kids all loved it. I was a bit scared to go on it at first, but before long we were all using it enough that we wore a dirt patch into the landing area. We even got the missionaries to go down it once when we had them over for dinner. (As far as I know, “going down a zip line” isn’t forbidden in the Missionary Handbook, but I suspect they didn’t go bragging to their mission president either.) We’d go down flipped upside down or backwards, or try to throw a Nerf ball to the person sliding down. It was awesome.