Meanwhile, up in Seattle, Judy had been waiting it out since her hideously-optimistically-timed arrival on Tuesday the 13th. A quiet day in West Seattle as guest of a friend with deep roots in the local cultural community included a yoga session, walks along the Seattle and West Seattle waterfronts, the unavoidable traipse through Pike's Place Market, a play ("I Am My Own Wife", a Tony-award-winning play by Doug Wright, about a German transvestite and cultural icon who survived both the SS and the Stasi), coffee with another friend, great tapas dinner with friends of her friends, and a modern [View Full Entry]

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After a series of phone calls from Ruth began to narrow down the likely Olympia rendezvous day to Sunday evening, Judy was sure that her hostess friend's patience was on the verge of evaporation. Having come armed with her border-crossing paraphernalia, she hopped a bus up to Vancouver for a quick return to her Home and Native Land and a visit with Vicky Yehl, a diamond geologist of some renown. After arriving and lunching at the Vancouver waterfront, the ladies walked a few miles along the Vancouver Seawall, one of Judy's traditional Rites of Return, and enjoyed floatplane after floatplane co [View Full Entry]

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Editors' Note Okay, friends and fans -- thanks for your patience with a flurry of updates of occasionally dubious quality and, as the Imperial Grand Pooh-Bah kindly took the trouble to complain, a variety of editing problems. We've corrected (via a "quiet publish" feature that didn't send a new email every time we fixed an existing entry) the stuff we had. The good news is that we invite you to VISIT THE ACTUAL BLOG to see a significantly-improved, edited, re-sequenced, and illustrated set of entries. Geoff and Ruth have provided plenty of commentary and notes to enable Judy to cor [View Full Entry]

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Well, we finally arrived in Tucson on May 14th, only 6 days behind the original schedule! How is that for planning? Tucson was planned as a two day stop including the lovingly-curated Pima Air Museum and the Boneyard at Davis Monthan AFB. We arrived at the day's final destination around 3 pm, positively buzzed by the aerial views as well as the Flagstaff visit. This was where the hospitality was fantastic. Nancy Blackwell, former club member, and two other people (Jim, a friend of Nancy's husband Jimmy Blackwell, and former club president Frank Z) met us at the airport about 4 [View Full Entry]

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Approaching the Grand Canyon: First Aerial Look This was leg was to be the LONG-anticipated aerial tour of the Grand Canyon by way of one of the special flight corridors over Grand Canyon National Park. Ruth and Bob Hawkins opined that "Flagstaff"and "Tucson" would be optimistic for today -- and their optimism was rewarded. After losing two days in Tennessee having to wait to replace a starter in one of the airplanes, and then by weather in Arkansas, their skepticism was understandable. The plan had been to fly from Page to Flagstaff to see some extraordinary but unspecified sigh [View Full Entry]

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Tuesday the 13th, Geoff was up and out at dawn to catch the sunrise at Horseshoe Bend, and was greatly gratified to have a couple of hours to capture images unimpeded by either other tourists or scratched plexiglass. "The light was optimum for photos and really showed the canyon to advantage! It's a breathtaking spot. You walk up the the lip of the canyon and it's a sheer maybe thousand foot drop, a long-ish way," he recounts. When he arrived back at the motel, the breakfast crowd was departing for the diner that proffered the heart-attack-heaven hamburger the night before, which [View Full Entry]

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Monday, Bob Hawkins' alarm went off uncharacteristically early and he woke the others. But because Ruth and Janice and Donna and Bill Hughes had made a Sunday night grocery run -- including kiddie pack cereals, juice, yogurt and a splendid repast, the group was able to set out around 8:30 am local on some actual sightseeing for an hour and a half of flying over and around Lake Powell, Glen Canyon, Horseshoe Bend and Marble Canyon in mostly clear but mildly hazy weather. After the flying tour, Donna and Larry peeled off in the RV-4 to drop off Donna in Flagstaff, [View Full Entry]

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We finally made it to Page, AZ and I, Donna An, will be closing my flight plan with C2C Radio tomorrow and heading for Flagstaff, AZ for work. I had 3.8 hours logged as a student pilot prior to this trip but now have approximately 24 hours. I've flown about 2000 nautical miles on this trip, practiced take off and landings at high altitude, have gotten more proficient at pre-flight checks and communication over the radio. But the greatest accomplishment I have made on this trip is the checklist I have developed for N069RH, the 6th club plane some of [View Full Entry]

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Sunday the 11th, the group arose bound and determined to make more than 200 miles, and were airborne at a record-early 9 am local from Santa Fe. This time the headwind finally abated and the turbulence was fairly mild. We made better time under less demanding conditions than probably any time since departing GAI, and certainly much better than the previous two days. We overflew the high desert in Canyonlands territory, with Geoff offering muttered curses for the poor visibility for photography that the elderly windows of 624 could offer him and his ten pounds of cameras and film. The g [View Full Entry]

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We departed Tucumcari around 10:30 am local -- MDT. We'd planned Santa Fe as a fuel stop with an intended destination of Page AZ. Things started off fairly well, flying-wise, but then the wind and turbulence kicked in with a vengeance. After only two hours in the air, Ruth wrote at just after 1 pm EDT: "We are down at Santa Fe, 26 knot winds down the runway...plan to wait a bit and see. Beautiful country...challenging flying for eastern greenhorns!" The landing was indeed challenging -- once we found the airport at all. We discovered that some airports in the southwest [View Full Entry]

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