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Just Can't Help Himself
So if Dick's not flight planning, he's ground planning. Bill, Ruth and Dick look over the transit map and bus schedule.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 rainshowers and scattered clouds at 2500 feet.
However, a call to flight service that forecast freezing levels and possible icing ranging from around 9000 feet where we were to as low as 6500 feet near Missoula discouraged a departure. Judy and Bob talked to Anne Culver just before we headed out for a local bus tour to enjoy another day here. She opined, more or less, that those of us who've flown search and rescue are all too familiar with how many of searches involved looking for guys who just made a run for it because they thought they could make
Walla Walla Transit
Our classy (and economical) conveyance to town it. She's glad that's not our way. Judy's mom also cheered us on, and up. Weather decision-making is the toughest part of the trip....which certainly beats being terrified in a bad-weather-decision flight. Than to be in the air wishing we were on the ground.
So pretty, eh? We can see snow on some of the peaks, and that's kinda what we didn't want to be in. "I planned to avoid the clouds," shrugged one of the pilots who'd have been willing to launch. Yep, but sometimes that's not the plan the clouds have for YOU, which can get dicey depending on where you are when that happens. "In a tight river canyon" wasn't that attractive an option. While there was a straight line route to the north, and apparently some smaller private fields that might have offered alternate landing places if the weather closed in, they aren't always easy to see., and definitely hard to hunt through a windscreen covered in ice.
The town's twenty-five cent bus ride takes us from right outside the motel to the downtown transfer point where two of our number headed for the WalMart and the other four changed buses and got off
Chatting up the Locals
Walla Wallan, left, gets Bob's answer to the question, "So what's with the ball caps? Who are you guys?" at the Veterans Hospital Grounds and walked through some historic Civil War Era officers' quarters on the way to the Fort Walla Walla museum. Dick and Bill had checked it out but arrived too close to closing time yesterday to visit. - an impressive place for one's seven bucks, and on the national park service's register of official stops on the Lewis and Clark Historic Trail.
The following pictures includes ones of sky over Walla Walla in early afternoon. By then it had warmed up considerably since yesterday, seems awfully pleasant, and we were working very hard not thinking about the Flight Not Taken. It might have been great...but then again it might not.
Never mind. Ruth has cousins in every place we seem to go, and one of her cousins recommended a bistro with a big bargoon happy hour, where they'd be gathering. We were all ready when it opened, pleased to have something to descend upon, even if it's not another airport today.
Walla walla traffic, circling to land!
Judy called flight service after dinner, and the forecast was for marginal VFR through where we want to go...looking at forecasts 90 minutes later, it
Everywhere You'd Want To Be
..the bus will get ya there didn't look awful...but Janice and Judy are sitting in the lounge back at the hotel watching the tornadoes on the weather channel whip across the midwest in Kansas and wondering exactly where that stuff is going to go...
Ruth is still out with cousins, the boys seem to have hit the hay or at least become invisible, and Judy and Janice are seriously thinking about a swim. Seriously. Thinking.
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