We're Headed to the Start!

Wednesday, June 18

Erin airlined up to Detroit this morning so we could spend the day preparing for our long journey to the Start of this year's Air Race Classic in Bozeman, Montana.

We ran some errands, finished up last-minute chart printing, ate quite possibly our last healthy meals for 2 weeks, bought matching shorts.... Lezlee fixed us some amazing pizza for dinner and we slept well considering our nerves.



Thursday, June 19

This morning dawned early with a phone call from the P.R. woman at Kelly's office. She told us that the Detroit Fox News crew was waiting at the airport for us! We scrambled to get ready and get out the door, arriving at VLL ready to load the plane by about 0830. We spent a little over an hour being interviewed on TV (obviously it'll be edited!) about the Race, about each of us and our interest in aviation, about the Air Charity Network and Angel Flight, about the 99s, etc. Both of us did a good job with our interviews (thankfully "Bernouli's Principle" was NOT talked about in this particular interview -- way to go, Kelly!), and without too much more fuss we were airborne. The camera woman wanted to get a shot of us doing a high-speed low-altitude fly-by, and as you can imagine we were only too happy to oblige. We took off and flew the traffic pattern, turning final going warp speed, swooping down to about 200 feet off the deck as fast as the Wonder Chariot would go, then shot back up to altitude like a rocket. (A maneuver of which Patty Wagstaff would have surely approved). With our nose pointed west we started off on what would be a 9.5 hour flight out to Bozeman, Montana.

With our bladders getting full we decided to stop for fuel in the booming metropolis of Mason City, Iowa, conveniently one of the stops along the Race route.


The W.C.'s tanks were full as were ours (the term "gastronomic delight" was used sparingly in conjunction with our lunch at the little airport cafe), so after about 30 minutes on the ground we took off with Aberdeen, South Dakota in our sights. We were feeling pretty fresh still so rather than landing we scoped out the airport from altitude (which is also another fly-by/stop point in the Race) and continued west. By the time we reached Miles City, Montana we were both feeling tired and anxious to be done with the trip. But just east of the airport we encountered our first weather of the day:

The trusty Garmin 496 with weather uplink warned us of the 2 cells up ahead....

Amazingly, they parted just enough for our airplane to slip through without much hassle at all! It rained and spewed out lightening just off of both wings, but other than some moderate turbulence (which made it tough to get good photos) we escaped unscathed!

We landed in Miles City and were happy to encounter a few teams of fellow racers. After brief introductions and the refilling our both our water bottles and our fuel tanks, we were airborne for the last time today. Finally down to the last 2 hours of flight time we were eager to get to the hotel and chill out.

But we wanted to experiment with a few potential race strategies. Because all sorts of eyes are reading this blog we're going to refrain at this moment from discussing specifics, but suffice it to say we were very pleased with our discoveries regarding altitude, airspeed, autopilot usage, weight and balance issues and antelope spotting.

We'll elaborate later....