Here’s today’s map. We have continued taking pictures with the N95 and using Shozu to upload them as soon as we take it. This has been a really great way to document and share the trip. So click the map to see today’s photos and where they came from.

If you look at the map you’ll notice that we didn’t take any pictures for a while. The reason is because we had a pretty sketchy hop. We took off from an airport called Twenty Nine Palms and headed for Apple Valley which is where we are now. It’s about 50 miles which should take about 50 minutes. However, it took us just over two hours to get here.

When we took off we had a head wind of about 20 mph. Not uncommon but the wind and the bumps just kept getting worse and worse. We were also having a hard time climbing because of the outside temperature, the field elevation, and because we were fully loaded with fuel. By the time we got half way we were barely breaking 4000 ft, struggling to climb so we could clear the pass.

To make things worse we were starting to move slower and slower as the winds kept picking up. With 40 miles to go our airspeed indicator was showing 75 mph while the GPS was reading a 30 knot ground speed, or about 35 mph. That’s a 40 mph head wind which is never any fun in a cub.

Then there was the fuel. We have 2.5 hours of fuel under normal conditions, meaning we don’t have the throttle pushed all the way forward. Fighting these winds and flying at nearly 6000 ft by the time we leveled off we nearly had the engine fire walled. So we had that in the back of our minds.

When we finally made it, the fuel gauge was almost reading empty. When we landed the wind was really strong and fortunately it was straight down runway 26. From the time our wheels touched the ground until the time we stopped we rolled less than 15 feet. After that run, we just called it a day.

I took the video below just after we tied down the plane. You can see from the background that the visibility is really low.

Today we also took some videos of us flying. I’ve posted them below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 6:24 pm and is filed under The Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.