I went Skyyyydivin...

And the Wheels Are Off

I want to introduce you all to a young man from Liberty City,Texas named Mr. Taylor Tehan. Found on facebook as Jacques Louis-Marie Proust. Tehan has been living in Paris since January/February and in turn as been here for many different guide crews spring/summer/and now fall. After giving all the tours we offer for 9 months now, Tehan has decided it is time to go home, briefly. For his final departure he organized a final night out on the town with the whole squad. After a 3 page toast he gave to all his co-workers of past and present we all walked the tour route we give everyday and took turns giving our own versions of each speech. Because there are no open container laws in this great city, it was just a progressive traveling party through the historic streets of Paris. Not your standard night tour by any means. Graham started the night off at the Eiffel Tower. Pretty cool at night isnt it? Its’ colored like that for the Rugby World Cup that is being held here right now. It is usually all gold at night. Anyways, this stop kind of set the tone for the night. We were all heckling him with all the stupid bullshit questions that people come up with everyday on our tours and that would continue at every stop.



I was up next with my stop at the Dome Church. This is where Napoleon B. is buried. I won’t go into any more history for you all because I do that everyday. But here are a few pics from my schpeel. Much more effective with a bottle of champagne as I’m sure you can imagine, yet still distracting with someone standing behind you pissing into the moat surrounding the 300+ year old building. That’s Tehan by the way.



Here we are on the other side of the Dome Church down inside the moat in front of Les Invalides. Andy and Mike would begin their speech from within the moat but we would soon be run out be security who had the police on their way. We had to quickly launch people from our shoulders to get them all out of the moat and then somehow Mike, one of my managers, got out last. From here we would run like hell to the next stop



Next, it was Bens turn from Pont Alexander Trois (Alexander III Bridge). Now if you know Ben, which most all of you do, you know he is one for theatrics. In the spirit of saying goodbyes from Paris, Ben would rewrite Elton John’s farewell tribute to Diana… to Tehan. This is probably the 4th or 5th time I have seen Ben sing so far on this trip so usually its just another night out with him. But this time is different because I can finally share it with you all so here ya go.





Here is Eliza rapping about the Place de la Concorde. This is about the point in the night where Adam would start dropping trou and dancing in front of whoever was talking. Pretty Entertaining.



Next up was the Louvre. This stop was Tehans. He would give his whole speech in a snoody Frenchie accent. Basically like a fruitcake. Funny as hell though. After that we went for the human pyramid. Lucky for us all on the bottom it only took like 5 takes to finally get it right. We were all well on our way to B.O.C. by now so it wasn’t that big of a deal. Notice how we perfectly replace the actual pyramid behind us. Just Tour Guidin…



The rest of the night was full of impromptu toast and cheers, late night Grecs (sandwiches), a stop at Notre Dame where Glenn would talk and say more than all of us knew combined, and finally would end at the Highlander, a cave bar that stays open until 6 a.m.

Swiss Land

This past weekend Graham, Ben and I went to a little place called Interlaken, Switzerland. I realize I am not what you would consider a well traveled individual, but I have been to what I though were a lot of beautiful places. Interlaken is by far the most amazing place I have ever seen or could imagine. It is a little town in a valley that has two gorgeous lakes on each side of it. The air smells of “cookies and pine needles”-(Ben Balagia), the water is crayon blue and the place is surrounded by the snow capped Alps and rolling green hills.





On the way out of town Sunday morning, we missed our first train because we were at the wrong station, so the trip was delayed about 4 hours but we would eventually make it to Switzerland. Just a test, that we obviously failed, to get the travel mistakes out early before we try to conquer the rest of Europe later in the fall. Anyways, Switzerland is just covered in lakes and beautiful mountainsides which made the 7 hour train ride go by rather quickly. We got to Interlaken and found our hostel called Balmer’s, which I highly recommend if you are planning on going, and got settled. We had to sign up for our events that night to make sure we could go so we had to make a decision quickly. Didn’t really know what exactly we wanted to do besides skydiving but knew we had some more time to be extreme if we wanted to. Back in Paris I had talked to some people on my tours about Canyoning and they were insistent that I do it if I made it to Interlaken. It didn’t take much convincing, but I got Graham and Ben on board so we signed up for them both. That night we went to the Hooters in town, against Grahams will, to get dinner. Not culturally stimulating I know, but Ben and I had been craving onion rings and wings so we got our way. Our waitress was named Ulrike. Think about it. After that we went to a bar in town called Cavernes that had some live music playing. Midway through the set Ben decides he wants to do a little number on the piano so he asks the lead singer if he would be cool with it. Two songs later he is jamming the Beatles “twist and shout” and the bar is loving it. The members of the band were all locals and didn’t all know the song real well so it kinda was just ended up being a repeat of the chorus over and over again, still great though. We would take it in a little early so we could get up and be extreme all day. Canyoning all day on Monday and Skydiving Tuesday morning. I had no idea how intense things would get over the next 48 hours.

Holy Shit (part 2 of 2) Skydiving

So I don’t know if a I ever told many of you about my first attempt to go skydiving. One Sunday afternoon this summer, right before the last of the guys moved off to go to work, a group of about 7 of us went down to San Marcos to go jump out of a plane. We got there, paid for it, signed all the forms, Greg paid a fat tax, etc. only to wait 4 ½ hours to let the storm clouds pass through, which never happened. Needless to say, we never got to take the plunge. We all drove back to Austin broken hearted and defeated. Well, as much as I would have enjoyed to camaraderie that that trip would have entailed, I cant help but say that I am glad I was forced to wait. As beautiful as Switzerland was from the train and from walking around town, seeing it from 11,000 feet was pretty BAD A as well. We got up Tuesday morning to go have a little breakfast at the hostel. The “Scenic Air’ crew then came to pick us up and take us to the drop zone. We get to the hangar and it is a pretty simple set up, just a hangar and a plane and some gear.






Now remember, everyday in Paris I am either telling people how to ride our bikes or teaching them how to ride a Segway, in much more detail than probably is necessary because as I have found, the general public is unbelievably retarded. Both take at least 10 minutes and sometimes up to 40 for the Segways. We even make you wear helmets for them. Some of these people should be required to wear helmets at all times. I seriously want to just tell them, “No, keep that on. Forever. It’s my gift to you.”
So far in Switzerland, between the two most extreme things I have ever done, the instructions were very brief and for Skydiving there were virtually no directions and no helmets, just lean your head back and feet behind you, that’s it. So Hans, my guide is getting me all geared up and I have a personal cameraman shooting the whole process. Graham, Ben, and I are all looking around at each other in sheer disbelief that this is about to happen. So we start to board the plane and Ben and his guide get in first, then Graham and his guide and the three cameramen and then finally me and Hans. So there are nine grown men shoved in the back of a plane not much bigger than what seemed like a bathtub. Its about a 15 minute ride to 11,000 feet and they flew us over the lakes and valleys and stuff. I don’t know that many words can describe the mix of feelings that were brewing inside me. AMAZED at the epic view from the sky and about to SHIT MY PANTS because I was going to jump out into it.


We were all jokin around with each other inside the plane on the way up to keep the mood light. Everything was going great until that moment when it hit me. Like I said, we were all packed in the back of this like a family of 9 packed in a VW bug trying to cross the border. Well, since I was the last one in, that means I was leaning up against the door. The same door that Hans would slide open when it was time to bail out. So all of the sudden the whole left side of my body is hanging out the side of a plane and its game time. Check out my faceI don’t remember all of this because I think I temporarily blacked out, but according to Ben and Graham my face went stone cold.




















I literally had to slide my feet around and hang them over the ledge and dangle them in the air. Lean my head back and just wait….When we made the push, the first 4-5 seconds took your breath away. At that point you could regroup and really realize what was all going on. Never can you freefall and not worry about when you are going to hit or if it was going to hurt. It was a completely different feeling than jumping from a bridge or canyoning or even bungee jumping. After about a 45-50 second freefall, Hans pulled the chute and we started to cruise for what was about a 5 minute fall from there. Completely unbelievable.

CHECK BACK HERE FOR FULL VIDEO SOON!


I don’t know when I will be able to do this again or where, but I am fairly positive it wasn’t my last time. Sorry mom. Overall the weekend was very intense. Going back to Paris to ride bikes and Segways seemed way lame now. But its all relative I suppose.

Holy Shit (part 1 of 2) - Canyoning

Let me tell you a little bit about a little something I like to call “Canyoning.” I had heard this mysterious sport described on many of my tours, but couldn’t really wrap my mind around exactly how it all made sense and neither will you. I have pictures though so just bear with me here. For those of you who may not be familiar with it, Canyoning is basically going to the top of a gorge making your way down by way of jumping off rocks into small pools, sliding down rock faces, repelling down waterfalls, etc. Whatever it takes to get down, you have to do and you have to do it right or in the words of our Kiwi guide Tim, “You’re gonna have a problem.” There were a few times when Tim would tell us what was ahead and how we were gonna handle it and it just left me thinking, “there’s no f-ing way this guy is being serious right now,” only to find out I was clearly underestimating the trip as well as Tim. By the end of the day Tim could have told me to somersault down the mountain and finish it off with a triple gainer and I’m pretty sure I would have given it my best shot. To be honest there was one point where they said, “Ok, this pool is plenty deep and wide enough to jump into so do whatever tricks you want here.” At this point in the trip, just jumping off a rock 15-20 feet above the water with no tricks would have been way too lame so everyone, including me, Graham, and Ben, just starts trying to do flips and stuff even if we had no idea if we could do it or not.




Some other extreme directions went something like this.

-"Ok, put your right foot on top of mine and push off the rock on your left with your other foot. Jump over the waterfall into the rock on the other side and turn your back to the wall while in the air. Keep your arms up once you hit the wall and slide down the rest of the way”- Are you shitting me?

-“So, do you see the little space between the waterfall and the wall on the right? That’s where you have to land. Don’t jump too far out either because there is a rock that comes out in front of you. You wanna go right there (pointing). 3-2-1 Go!”

At one point in the trip Ben looks at me and says something that I think really put us in our place for the trip. “Lets get one thing straight, we give bike tours, these guys are ****ing tour guides.” I feel comfortable in saying that in Paris, at no point during my tours, be it Segway or bike, that my customers trust me with their overall well being nor do I feel overly responsible for their every move. My only option to get down was to do exactly what these guys said. Some of the drops were upwards of 60 feet.



You can see that on each of our helmets was a nickname. These made for a good laugh as you can imagine especially when I strapped on “pussycat.” Very strategic choice on my part I know. Turns out these aren’t just for laughs but they are the names that the guides and cameramen call you to get your attention. So all day I was responding to grown men calling me “pussycat.” Graham was “Bandit” and Ben was “Growler”. Due to the potentially graphic nature that the name “pussycat” lends itself to, I will forewarn you that some of the pics may seem... well you know what I’m talking about.



Although EXTREMEly awesome and exhilarating, Canyoning wears you down. All day you are constantly pushing yourself to do shit you would never do anywhere else at anytime while some dude is standing next to you giving you a 3 second countdown. There’s no time to contemplate whether or not you think you can do it, you just go for it. At one point Ben had to ask the guy for a countdown just so he would make himself jump. Every corner was a new adventure. You would land in the freezing cold water, get out as quick as you could and try to pump yourself back up for the next obstacle. Overall, we descended about 800ft, that’s an 80 story building. So when the day was over we all passed out for a few hours on the ride home and back at the hostel. Next up: Skydiving

Once upon a time...

My fellow Americans. Whats up? I hope you all enjoyed that little video treat below as much as I did. Hopefully that’s why you are back reading again today. Anyways things are still great here in Paris and all the locals have finally returned. School at the American University in Paris has now started. It has been tough lately to find younger people out and about that speak English so hopefully of the 350 students that just started at AUP we can find a few that are down for a good time.

As for the first football game I am glad we could all collectively breathe together after last Saturday’s performance. I have to admit I really did miss Gameday with you guys and am very impressed with the tailgate skills you displayed. Well done. Of the few pictures that I have seen it doesn’t appear any of you has missed a step. In fact you may have gained a few. All of that with no FRAT to depend on…impressive. Lots of fellowship im sure. We did not end up getting to watch the game with the alumni chapter as we had hoped but we were able to see it on the internet the next day. Not the greatest way to watch it but you gotta take what you can get. Believe it or not American College Football doesn’t appear to be on the top of anyone’s priority list over here in France. We have to wait week to week to see what will be carried on pay per view so we don’t really know which ones we will see just yet.

As for the Bike Tours, it appears that its par for the course to have at least one just shitty tour experience a week. This particular fairytale begins like so.

“Once upon a time there were five Portuguese doctors and their families traveling throughout Europe that knew nothing of the English language. All 18 of whom were traveling together with one interpreter. This one translator, being the supreme being that he was had the bright idea to sign them all up for an English speaking tour of Paris, France. On Segways. Unbeknownst to one particular young man, he would wake one Tuesday afternoon for the ride of his life…..”

Just in case you guys cant paint the rest of this picture yourself, please let me humor you. We first decided to split them into 2 separate tours. The first one would be the five fathers and the second tour would consist of the wives and kids. Why it was split this way I have no idea but that was just the beginning of the pandemonium that would ensue.

Let me first explain what the Segway tour for a minute and the people that are attracted to them. It is a 70 euro, ($100), 3 ½ reservation only tour. Everyone signs waivers saying they understand that if they act like complete and utter jackasses on these things they could end up coughing up the 5 large ($5000) that it cost to pay for one. We then spend roughly 30-45 minutes training you how not to act like a complete and utter jackasses so that you wont be down $5000 at the end of the day, and so you will have a “safe and great time riding through the streets of Paris.” If one pays attention to what we tell them and isn’t too busy trying to look cool in a helmet, which is impossible, then there is no reason for there to be any problems.

As for the people that come on these, I think I can pretty much break it down into a few separate categories for you.(1) The people who care about what you have to say and are scared to death to break one of these machines so they are easy to manipulate, and therefore make for an easy tour. (2) There are the techies who are obsessed with the technology that makes these things run, also fairly easy to handle but can act up on occasion while trying to “assess its capabilities”. (3) The wealthier families who can drop $500 on a tour of Paris just to keep their precious little children entertained and happy. They care somewhat about the history but really just are trying to appease the little ones by letting them ride around. (4) OVERCONFIDENT COCKY PEOPLE WITH TOO MUCH MONEY AND NO ABILITY TO TAKE DIRECTION.

So for the sake of my story we will randomly pick Group 4 to continue with our fairytale. So two guides, myself and Emily, take the group of 5 doctors (in Segway lingo, this is a squad of group 4’s equivalent to the 1992 USA Dream Team, except they have never seen a basketball before). Sorry if that analogy was too much, but I know some of you can appreciate it. Anyways we soon find out that we will first train the interpreter on each step and he will then pass along his knowledge to the Docs. Lots of head nodding going on through each step and everyone appears to understand. To their credit they were very intelligent guys and picked it up rather quickly. We also trained the moms and kids together which was significantly tougher but knew a little but more of how to deal with them after dealing with the dads.

By now, you may be thinking to yourself, “How are they going to understand the information on the tour? Is the translator going to interpret the whole thing?” The answers to those questions respectively are “They don’t care and No.” They paid just to ride around on Segways, we didn’t even take them all over the city. We could have let them loose in a corn field and it would have been just as informative and probably even safer for the civilians around them. By the end of the day we were 3 for 18. This means that 3 people bit it hard, and on the gravel much less. This means that 3 times we had to get the first aid kits out and bandage people up…once we could get them to stop bleeding. THIS MEANS THAT 2 TIMES PEOPLE DIDN’T LEARN FROM THE LAST IDIOT WHO ACTED LIKE A COMPLETE AND UTTER JACKASS.

After carefully analyzing my afternoon in order to better prepare myself should the same situation present itself again I realized what had just happened. What I am about to say has no racial or ethnic connotation but was honest the closest comparison I could think of. Short of throwing their own feces at me, I had basically just given a Segway tour to a group of monkeys. They could stand on a Segway. They could nod their heads as if to appear to understand what I was telling them as well as to trick the man in the yellow hat (interpreter). And given their first chance they went absolutely insane. In the end I literally had to corral these people and take them back to the shop short of the full tour so that they did not end up killing themselves, each other, innocent bystanders, or me. You live and you learn.

So what did I learn? Nothing. There was nothing I could have done to prevent these people from doing what they did, short of learning to speak Portuguese. All in all I can say it was the hardest tour I had given. But looking back, I realized I stressed out way more than I should have. I was totally in the clear for all situations that might occur. They had signed the waivers. I had taught them how to safely operate the machines. I had a loaded first aid kit with me. Hell, I had 5 doctors to pass them off to should they really screw up. I could have just let them keep on going and watched and laughed, patched each person up as necessary and headed back once we ran out of bandages, maybe even gotten a few brand new segways out of the deal.

Anyways, I am off to Interlocken, Switzerland this weekend for some extreme sporting adventures. I won’t say which ones just yet because my mom reads this and I want her to be able to sleep over the next couple of days. I will be sure to update you and share some pics once I get back. As for the Horns. None of that negativity. I think we got this. You guys have an awesome time at the tailgate again and try not to fight your TCU friends, its only football. I can only imagine how much shit they are talking right now though, must be tough. Take it easy everyone.

Oh ya , and I stripped to my wears at the Louvre. Perge!

I know what you might be thinking but...

I finally decided it was necessary to add this video. Both Graham and I have had people sending it to us thinking that its somewhat similar to what we might be spending our time doing here. Riding bikes around France, eating baguettes and speaking broken French to girls while not understanding a word they say?? Not even close.