We Made It!!

We made our final destination last night a couple of hours before sun down. We made a hard push to make it home because we were looking at a possible front bringing in some weather. We were worried that if we didn’t get in that we wouldn’t get in until Sunday.

We took off from Apple Valley at 7:30 AM and headed into the high desert towards the southern edge of the Edwards Air Force Base military operation area. Once we got past that we climbed up to 5000 ft to get into Tahachapi pass. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the winds that were being reported were inaccurate. You can see from the video below that we were concerned that we might not make it through the high desert.

When we got to the top the wind wasn’t bad at all but it was amazingly cold. I didn’t take too may pictures heading into the pass because my hands were too cold. I did get a couple, however they didn’t get a geo tag. The picture on the left is from the edge of the Tahachapi pass just before you climb over and see the Tahachapi airport. The field elevation there is about 4000 ft. Tahachapi was the last high pass. From there it was all down hill. We dropped into the central valley and headed North.

Our experience from the day before on the long two hour run gave us the confidence to skip a couple of our planned stops. Instead of doing four sixty mile runs we did two one hundred and twenty mile runs. That cut quite a bit off of our travel time. We actually had to hold up at our second to last stop in order to give our friends a chance to get to Sky Park from the city.

We left Tracey and headed towards Mt Diablo. Once over the foothills we dropped into the Delta to the North East of San Francisco and headed straight for Sky Park. As we got closer and closer the sky got hazier and hazier. Because I had never flown into the area I was a little worried but it turned out that the visibility was just fine all the way in.

When we got to the airport we had a handful of friends waiting there to greet us, take photos and pop a bottle of champagne. We took some photos and video from the landing but I need to get them from my friends. I’ll put a final de-brief up in the next day or so. I’ll add up the hours, fuel, list of all the places we landed, and so on.

The picture on the left is the entire crew from the trip. From left to right that’s Tom Howard who rode in the front seat with me the entire way as co-pilot. That’s me in the middle. On the right it Tom Garland who drove ground support the entire way. I would have never made it without these guys and want to say a big thanks to Tom and Tom.

To Tom Howard, an especially big thanks for being there on Day Five when we went through the high winds and dust storm heading into Apple Valley. That was a really difficult run and having you up front calling the air speed, time and estimated fuel was really comforting.

To Tom Garland, providing ground support took a lot of pressure off and let us focus our attention on getting between the stops. It was a good feeling to know that there was someone meeting us on the ground and we didn’t need to try and find airport cars and cabs to get everywhere.

On Saturday at Sky Park there’s a cook out and I’ll take the final photos for the blog at that time. Until then, thanks to everyone that followed us on the trip. It was really fun making the journey and sharing it online with everyone.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 9:43 am 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.