Previously, the most exciting thing that happened during a lesson is when the wind picked up the tail of the Cherokee while I was starting my flare for landing. If my instructor had not been in the right seat, I might have bent the nose gear. (Now I am alert for this sort of gust as I am landing. At the time it was a surprise that the wind could switch from headwind to tailwind in an instant and shove the plane around like that. I froze for a moment.)

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According to my logbook I have flown the round trip from Santa Monica’s municipal airport to Henderson Executive Airport fifteen times (as of September 12, 2006). I had one more flight into Las Vegas, but it was a stop in Boulder City. Same flight, I suppose; it is about two hours each direction. It seems like it should be routine at this point. Certainly by the time I had made even a dozen flights on Southwest along the same route I had settled into a jaded shuffle from airport lounge to airplane seat and out to the automobile seat that I would ride either to the site or back home. Flying myself, though, I am still fascinated by every stage of the journey.

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This past weekend I took Rudy to Comic-con. It is the international convention of people in the comic business, held each year in San Diego. With the success of movies like Batman, The Matrix, Spider-man, Batman Begins, X-Men and so forth, Hollywood has discovered Comic-con. Attendance has exploded. In my later youth (maybe I’m still in that), I was one of only a few kids I knew who read comic books, so I’ve always considered comics a small, niche audience, a strange little subculture. When it was possible to schedule a day to take a look with Rudy (who loves comics like only a ten-year old can) I jumped at it.
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Adam was running his laboratory and teaching classes up at Friday Harbor Island Marine Station. That’s on one of the San Juan Islands off of Seattle. Bob and I were curious about taking a long flight, and I checked to see how long it would take. Eight and a half hours each direction, and since I couldn’t be away from home for more than a night it would be seventeen hours of flying in two days.

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Nell has friends, Tom and Marcy, who live up in Sonoma Valley, north of San Francisco. We visited them when Rudy was too small to walk and had a great time. Rudy and I stopped by again when Rudy was around three to go to a wedding in neighboring Napa Valley. We’ve been saying ever since that we should go back. “We should go up to see Marcy in the spring…” would turn to “We should go up to see Marcy in the fall…” and around again to the spring. It’s a long drive (over six hours), but seems too short to use a commercial flight for. (We’d fly from LAX to Oakland and the truth is that between parking, getting through security, renting a car on the other end… we probably would be close to the driving time anyway. It’s an hour and a half in a Southwest 737 and Oakland is still nearly a two hour drive from Sonoma.)
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Okay, so I had to put some out-of-state hours on the airplane and I had gotten a little tired of the flight to Vegas. I checked the chart and decide to fly to Lake Havasu, just over the Arizona border.

I worked out ahead of time for this to be my IFR cross-country flight. It was going to be a fun flight where I landed at three different airports with three different types of approaches and did at least 250nm in the plane. It was going to be an early morning sort of flight. Then the scheduling computer that Justice Aviation uses screwed up, and my flight instructor was booked during the time we would be returning, which meant that I couldn’t do it during the day.

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Bob was in Las Vegas and I needed to visit the Castle site. Adam had a research friend who was in town and interested in taking a flight. I am not sure you could pay me to ride back and forth to Las Vegas in the back seat if I had nothing to do in Las Vegas, but Steve seemed game.

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I didn’t know I had connivance. I’ll have to get those inserts for my shoes, which I think takes care of that.

Axel was a great passenger. He loved the entire ride and he pointed out all sorts of interesting nature events and talked about the recently published study about the effectiveness of prayer. He writes a column for the German equivalent of the Wall Street Journal and that week’s column was about how we really don’t need to keep doing that study; prayer doesn’t work.
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