At 5:50 am, Judy once again passed by Dick, set up with his computer checking weather, while she was on her way to the gym. Several hours later. after considerable peering at possible routes either from Walla Walla via Lewiston and then VOR routing to Missoula (which featured several private airports as possible diversion points if we'd needed an alternate over high territory) or along a river valley that offered a winding highway as an alternate landing strip if necessary, the weather did have many encouraging features -- ceilings about 5500 feet above ground level, with only scattered ra [View Full Entry]

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Ruth was already up when Judy headed down to the treadmill at 6:15 am, passing by Dick, who greeted her in the lobby. He looked like he'd been there for hours had already, having set up shop there with his laptop computer while his comrades slept. He was peering intently at displays from the ADDS aviation weather site, particularly the high- and low-level radar returns and the big picture of the satellite images for the Pacific moving into the Pacific northwest and upper midwest. Clearly Judy had time to fit in an hour in the gym, and Janice easy got in [View Full Entry]

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Ruth and Judy drove this morning from Olympia, where we had stayed since Sunday night with Ruth's warm and generous cousin Margie Taylor and family, to Aurora airport to link up with the other pilots. We dropped off Geoff Hornseth at the airport shuttle for Seattle -- he had been traveling with the group since May 4th -- has to get home and can't wait for the uncertain arrival of C2C. Irregular low ragged rolls of maritime scud slurp up the hilltops on the left as we drive south. Bright yellow broom -- flowers -- pop out low along the road [View Full Entry]

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Editor's note This is just a text-only update -- for now. We will "quiet publish" -- that is, update without pestering you with another email -- this entry by adding pictures later tonight or tomorrow...whenever we get wherever it is we may end up going today. Writing this on Wednesday the 21st, Judy has offered to help the others catch up on their last few days and has plopped herself down on the sofa next to Bob Hawkins. "You expect me to talk?" he asks. So of course, he does. "So far, the trip has been educational and fun, comments Bob. [View Full Entry]

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Some of you may think this trip has been all fun and games and of course you are right. In addition to sampling every newly discovered local beer and discovering the only known Denney’s to serve beer, here in Wilsonville, Oregon, we have actually been doing some really neat flying. It’s been a real adventure knowing that every day we will be flying over countryside that we’ve never seen before and landing at airports we’ve never seen before. For flatlanders flying through airspace where at 8500 or 9500 feet we are looking up at mountains that run a thousand or couple [View Full Entry]

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Editor's Note Once Judy arrived in Olympia, she began to collect post-action reports from Ruth and Geoff to catch up the entries. Right now, weather's not bad, but a front's headed in. Whether we try to get out ahead of it and let it chase us across the country, or wait for it to pass and hope for a big fat high driving some happy prevailing westerlies remains to be seen. In the meantime, here's the Sunday report. "You'd better tell people to pay attention to the blog again," intones Geoff, who's dictating to Judy, "or the club will think we [View Full Entry]

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Jackie Ashley, Ruth's cousin Margie's neighbor, included Judy on a walk with her kids and Margie's grandkids to feed goats and chickens that live on a nearby campground. When SHE heard what had brought Ruth and Judy to town, she said, "You should see what my husband Clayton has in the garage -- it's his second wife!" Um, okay... So, here she is... Clayton finished building the helicycle in 2005, and modified it from a kit designed by B.J. Schramm, founder of Rotorway, to sport a 100 horsepower turbine engine. [View Full Entry]

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Sunday, we breakfasted at the hotel and began our trip's two-week anniversary with the news that Alex had decided to return home commercial from Seattle, and Gashaw had decided not to come west after all. Extensive route planning followed, as whatever plans we THOUGHT we'd laid for our final northbound leg had been totally scrapped by this point. After much peering at the sectional charts, we plotted a northbound route to Portland through some significant mountain passes in the Trinity Mountains of northern California. The weather, fortunately, wasn't a factor this far inland --unlike the c [View Full Entry]

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Judy overnighted on the 17th with former debating buddy Vicky Yehl. You might have seen Vicky on a recent segment of the Discovery Channel, all about mining for diamonds in the Canadian north! She gave Judy the backstory about which apparently hardworking site was about to go bust, and which guys were competent geologists and which ones weren't... the two of them had a lively visit, brunched with Vicky's beau and fellow geologist Derek, and Judy climbed back aboard the Cantrail bus for a five hour jaunt (90 minutes of which was spent waiting to clear the border with all the [View Full Entry]

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Porterville: a hot, dry departure. The airshow people were doing their thing, and we had to fit our departure in between their graceful formation takeoff practice runs. We were finally on our last leg towards our first view of the Pacific Ocean. We took off around noon. In the early afternoon, we sighted the blue of the Pacific as Monterey Bay heaved into view. Near the posh city of Monterey, we then turned northbound to parallel the coast. As noted in omnibus entry, ATC gave us fabulous assistance and clearances that gave us great views of the Golden Gate Bridge and [View Full Entry]

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