I’m not an environmental nut. I have a friend who says that the Green movement is just a substitute for religion, which scares me because it appears to be so true. There are some who proselytize, but most seem to use their Green belief to atone for the sins of the populace at large, as if a two minute shower will make a difference when China and India both pour oceans of gases into the atmosphere. These little acts of faith are just tear drops in the salted sea, as far as I can tell, as effective toward changing the trend in global warming as prayer.

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Some of the blog isn’t going to be in the order it happened. Darn.

It was a long trip across the country to the east coast, and even though it was exciting and exhilarating, I was exhausted by the time I flew the last two hours twenty minutes solo from Maryland up to my sister’s place in Rhode Island. That was a Friday, August 3. It was a great arrival, because my sister, Brett, and her husband, Dave, weren’t sure I was going to make it. (I told them that it was possible that weather would force me down in New Jersey and that meant I would just spend the night in the city.) So they told my niece, Willa, and nephew, Jasper, that they were just going to the airport to watch the planes. Willa and Jasper are seven and four, when disappointment is a little more acute.
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East to West

BDR – AVP

Bob Whitehead, my business partner, decided that he’d rather brave the little plane than the cattle car of SouthWest to get back to Santa Monica.

Nell convinced me that the smart thing to do was to fly up to Bob’s place in Pennsylvania the night before (the plane was at Bridgeport, CT getting an oil change). So I took a Metro North commuter train out of Grand Central Station and up to Bridgeport. The train ride was longer than the plane ride across the Alleghenies.

There was an overcast sky, so I had filed an IFR flight plan, but it was a high ceiling over both airports and the few airports in between. I checked the chart and although there was rising terrain west of the Hudson it wasn’t high enough to meet the clouds. I would squeeze through VFR, which is more fun since I would get to sightsee along the way. The best laid plans…

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I’ve written before about my anxiety concerning the engine that powers our plane. It’s a very simple internal combustion engine, but because the technology is so old, I am responsible for settings that are totally automatic in my Toyota. I open the throttle (allow air to mix with the fuel), adjust the revolutions per minute, and set the mixture of fuel to air. It doesn’t seem that I should be responsible for these things and for keeping the plane at the right altitude, attitude, airspeed and heading, but I am. Especially in the era of computers, where I fly with more computing power in my plane than they had in the lunar landing module (or back in mission control, for that matter), it seems absurd.
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Oh, I have quite a few things to write about, since I’ve flown both directions across the continent. I’ve crossed the northern border to our colder brother to the north. I’m working on those entries, but in the meantime, just a little news:

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