A Record Breaking High Wire Walk

Wednesday night I watched Nik Wallenda make a record breaking tight rope walk on the Discovery Channel's "Life on a Wire".    I wish I could embed a video for you but for some reason I can't get the blogger video to work ... maybe it's just me or maybe its blogger... again!

I must admit that the information I had gleaned from the June 22nd edition of the Sarasota - Manatee Herald Tribune was not completely correct.  It was stated that the premiere episode of this new reality series would be in San Juan Puerto Rico where Nik and his mother, Delilah, would walk across a 300 foot high wire.  In truth the episode was filmed in the Bahamas where Nik, his family and crew set up his high wire rigging between two high rise luxury hotels ... spanning a distance of 2,000 feet and over 200 feet in the air. 

I held my breath as he went across the wire and can only imagine how suspenseful and terrifying it must have been to watch live from the audience far, far below.  Nik first went across the cable on a bike and then later ventured across this huge expanse on foot and holding a balance pole.  Afternoon tropical winds had picked up, the warning of an approaching storm.  Nik's shirt flapped and fluttered about him but he was on the wire and now committed, there was no turning back. 
Meanwhile, on the ground below, his wife and mother rushed about frantically giving commands to the men holding the stabilizing cables that kept the high wire from swaying.  "Pull back tighter !  See the the way that cable sags?  Lean that way, take that slack out to the cable."  The two women had a lot at stake here, Nik was a husband to one and the father of her children and to the other he was a beloved son.   Both women knew that a fall from such heights meant certain death and the Wallenda family was no stranger to death.  In the past, through 7 generations of Wallendas, there had been several injuries and a number of lives lost in fatal falls ... one of which was a fall that involved a multi person high wire pyramid.  The fear factor was extreme and very real.  Breaths held, hearts stopped until Nik finally reached the safety of the building at other end of the cable.

As I said, I wish I could have embedded a video for you, however I did receive this from Delilah this morning on facebook :

Delilah Wallenda, a circus high-wire acrobat and the seventh generation of the Flying Wallendas circus family, walks across a 300-foot-long wire suspended 100 feet in the air between two towers of the Conrad Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Saturday June 4, 2011. Delilah's grandfather, the German-born Karl Wallenda, tried to perform the same feat in 1978 but fell to his death at age 73. Delilah and her son Nik Wallenda commemorated the famous family patriarch by successfully completing the same stunt simultaneously Saturday. (AP Photo/Ricardo Arduengo)http://my.news.yahoo.com/photos/delilah-wallenda-circus-high-wire-acrobat-seventh-generation-photo-193152661.html

FOR SOME REASON THE ABOVE LINK ISN'T WORKING IN BLOGGER I'LL TRY THIS AND KEEP MY FINGERS CROSSED :
DELILAH WALLENDA