Sunday, October 26, 2008

Furnace Creek Inn Brunch

Today Michelle and I flew to the Furnace Creek Inn for brunch. We flew south of the China Lake restricted airspace from Inyokern towards Trona and turned north over Trona between the China Lake R-2505 and Echo Range R-2524 restricted airspaces. Once we were north of the Echo range, we turned back east to cross the Panamint mountains into Death Valley. We turned north and flew up Death Valley over Badwater as we approached to land at the Furnace Airport L06. The was no wind and we landed runway 15 since the Mooney ahead of us had used that runway. There were cables to attach tie-downs to, but no tie-downs. I didn't have my tie-downs with me since I removed them for weight when we flew up to San Jose. I pulled the parking break, put the plugs and control lock in and called it good; we'd only be gone an hour and there was zero wind.

Obligatory mugshot


Telescope peak, I've climbed this 2 or 3 times.

Badwater


Furnace Creek Inn resort

Furnace Creek airport L09

The Mooney pilot already had called for the shuttle to the Inn so it arrived just as I finished securing the airplane. The Mooney folks were staying the week at the Furnace Creek ranch so the driver dropped them off first and then drove us up to the Inn, it was probably less than 5 minutes, but I'm glad we didn't walk it. There's only a gravel shoulder and it's uphill for about a mile. There was no wait for the brunch, which I guess is unusual, but the staff said this was because this is the first weekend they are open for the season and not everybody knows they are open again yet. The driver said they usually get between 12 to 40 pilots a weekend, today I was number 3.


The food was excellent and came with eggs to order, an entree on the menu, and the buffet. Michelle and I got omelettes that were way bigger than they needed to be, but they were very good. I ordered the french toast/pancakes/crepes (they were all mini) and Michelle ordered the Pasta Primavera. We also had fruit and too much desert from the buffet. Definitely a top notch brunch although it was a bit pricey at $21.95 per person. After brunch we walked around the resort a little before taking the shuttle back to the airport.

She really loved that dessert buffet


The airplane was still there safe and sound and there was still no wind. Michelle decided she wanted to head up the valley to take a look at Scotty's castle and the Ubehebe crater. We took off and headed north at 2500 feet to maintain 2000 ft over the national park. I called up Riverside Radio and asked if they were familiar with the Ubehebe crater or Scotty's castle for waypoints and they said they were not. She wanted to file me from Furnace Creek back to Inyokern, but I thought that would be dumb since we were flying 45 miles north of that route. I told her my route would be Furnace Creek L06, Stovepipe Wells L09, then up to Bishop BIH before heading south to Inyokern IYK. We weren't going to fly even close to that far north, but that put a line across where we would be flying in case something were to happen. That we at least they'd be looking in the right area. We circled around the sand dunes and airport at Stovepipe Wells and then continued north. We climbed up to 4500 ft as the valley floor started to climb to the north.

My altimeter is below zero!

Sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells

We circled around the crater once, which was very easy to find from the air then headed back east to fly over Scotty's castle. I climbed a bit more since they were nestled in the mountains a bit. After we left Scotty's, we climbed up to 10,500 ft and headed east through a pass and flew over Saline Valley on our way to Owen's Lake. I couldn't reach Joshua approach until we reached Owen's Valley even though we were pretty high. They responded near Lone Pine and I got flight following back to IYK. On our way down the valley, we could clearly see Mt. Whitney, Olancha peak, Owen's Lake, the cinder cone, and Fossil Falls.


Ubehebe Crater. Michelle and I visited here with my parents a few years ago.

Scotty's Castle, we also visited here with my parents.

Mt. Whitney, it's the one below the space between "visited here" in the title of the above picture. Kevin and I climbed this a few months ago.

Lava flow and Fossil Falls.

More Lava flow

I started a nice slow descent towards Inyokern, but we never felt any bumps. The wind was out of the south, which is not too common and we landed straight in runway 15 to avoid the tow-plane operation on runway 2-20. I recorded the tach time at 2.1 hours and the timer at 2.4 hours. Fuel burn was a bit high at 13.8 gph, but we did do a bunch of low level flying, which does take more fuel. I love flying this time of year because the air is smooth and cool, the flight was perfect. This is the first flight I'll enter into my new logbook (I just filled my original logbook).

The link to the photo album for this flight can be found here.

Monday, October 20, 2008

It's a Girl!

So Michelle and I went to the doctor today for her sonogram. The baby looks perfectly healthy, all of the measure were proportional and no defects were found. The doctor was also able to get a good picture this time and said it is a girl! Here is a link to the ultrasounds if you'd like to see them.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jayson.brouchoud/Baby?authkey=RVDuy5S0VIQ#slideshow

Now that we know the sex we can start thinking about names. We didn't start thinking about names yet since it would be twice as hard if you have to think of both boys and girls names.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Breakfast in Hesperia

This morning Michelle and I flew down to Hesperia for breakfast and to fuel up the airplane (their gas is 64 cents cheaper than at Inyokern). The flight down there was very smooth and we were cleared through Edwards restricted airspace above 5000 ft; we flew at 7500 ft. We flew around the unmanned vehicle airspace west of Victorville by overflying the Victorville airport. Hesperia's airport L26 was very difficult to spot as we were approaching, another reason the GPS is so helpful. As you can see from the picture, the airport is not much more than another road in a congested area. We did hit a gust just before touchdown, but I actually made a fairly nice landing.

Here is a picture of the solar panels near Kramer Junction.

Here is a picture of the airplanes at the graveyard at the Victorville airport.


Here is a picture of the High Desert Mavericks stadium near Adelanto, CA.

Final approach into Hesperia, L26.



The fuel price was $4.55 as advertised, but my Citi card was being denied again. They keep turning it off when I buy gas as an fraud early warning flag. I called them again telling them I'm a pilot and I have to use a credit card to buy fuel and when the keep shutting my card off, I'm going to get stuck since I won't be able to refuel. Breakfast was very good with portions twice the size of what I should have eaten.

On the way back to the airplane, I saw gas dripping from my right fuel vent. This is normal when fuel expands, but it was quite a bit of leaking. I didn't notice it earlier, but now I did notice the very slight angle I was parked on. The gas was flowing from my left tank to the right tank then leaking through the vent. This is a common problem with airplanes and is usually only fixed by not completely filling the tanks or parking perfectly level. I don't know exactly how much fuel leaked, but I think it was enough to offset the fuel savings gained by the cheap price.

The flight back to Inyokern was just a little bumpy, but nothing to complain about. It took awhile to get flight following since the controller was pretty busy. I managed to make a nearly perfect landing in Inyokern and that was a good feeling because I feel that even though I keep trying, my landings typically seem to be in the safe, but not great category.

Round trip I put 1.7 hours in my logbook and filled my last entry in my logbook. This was still my original logbook, which started back on January 23rd, 2000 and ends today with 422.2 hours total time, 615 landings, and 85 instrument approaches.

Monday, October 13, 2008

1st Anniversary

Michelle and I have survived our first year in married life; so far life has been great! For our wedding gift, Michelle's brothers and sisters bought us a weekend at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas to celebrate our 1st anniversary. This weekend we cashed in their gift and had a great anniversary. We were set up in a spa suite that had a spa right in our bathroom.

We were planning on flying into North Las Vegas instead of driving all the way there, but the terrible winds that finally passed through Ridgecrest were still howling in Vegas. At noon on Saturday, the winds were still strong and they were forecasting turbulence. The weather as forested to improve throughout the weekend so we would have been fine coming back. We could have flown to Vegas, but it would have not been the best flight, so we decided to drive. This also gave us some flexibility while we were there since we would have a car and not have to take a taxi everywhere.

We risked taking the I-15 through Barstow on a holiday weekend since we were leaving pretty late in the day. The traffic was pretty busy, but never slowed down and were were there in 3.5 hours. We checked in and took a tour around the MGM and decided to eat at Diego's for dinner. This was a fancy Mexican restaurant, the food was great. On the way back from dinner we found an arcade and I got to fly an airliner (I just sat there, I didn't actually play it).





Sunday, we decided that we would take advantage of being in a big city and go start our baby registries. I know I know, why were we doing baby registry stuff on our anniversary. Here's the thing, it's a 2 hour drive each way for us to do it another weekend and would have taken an entire day after doing the registries and eating. First we went to Baby's R Us (couldn't figure out how to type a backwards R), this took FOREVER since you have to go through the ENTIRE store and I have no idea what half of the stuff is. I'm sure I'll figure it out when I have to, but for now, I really don't know the difference between one bath thing or the other.

After Baby's R Us, we went to BW3 (Buffalo Wild Wings) for lunch and to watch the Packers! They put the Packers on the big screen and we were able to stay and watch the whole game. I can't believe how much food we ate there, but man was it good. After lunch we headed to Target to finish our registry there. This one was much quicker since you only have to worry about the baby section, not the whole store. While Michelle was looking at some toys, the dogs started acting up. They are pretty upset that we are having a kid and managed to convince me that the least I could do was to put some stuff on the baby registry for them...

After Target, we headed to the Rio to pick up our Penn & Teller tickets since the required that you pick them up at least an hour in advance. We got there around 6:30 and the show started at 9:00, but you had to be there 30 minutes early for seating so we decided to just stay at the Rio instead of going to the MGM and coming back. Not a big deal, but it would have been nice to sit down and relax for a bit, and we could have got our camera. To waste the time, we went to a restaurant for drinks and desert since we were still full from lunch. We got an Apple Streusel with ice cream that was incredible and I got to have an Alaskan Amber. Yes I just listed the beer I drank because it is a big deal; we just don't get good beer in Ridgecrest.

After desert we decided to gamble a little bit. All of the blackjack tables were $25 minimum so we skipped that. The roulette tables were $2 minimum so that was better, until we realized that it really wasn't $2 minimum as we thought. It was $10 minimum per spin, but you could have down to $2 per spot on the numbers as long as you had at least $10 total. That was more than we wanted to spend so we chipped out without playing at all. We headed over to the big wheel that Michelle talks about a lot. It's just like roulette, but it only has 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s, 20s, and 40s. If you pick 1 and it lands on 1, then you get paid 1:1, if you pick a 10 and it lands on a 10, you get paid 10:1, etc. This was fun for awhile, Michelle lost $10 and I was even with $20. As we were going to cash out we passed the roulette table again and Michelle said what the heck give it a shot. As I was down to the last $5, I hit where I was playing 4 numbers so I got paid out 8:1. Long story short we won in Vegas again even if it was only $5.00! On the gambling topic, I've got no poker stories since I didn't want to ditch Michelle on our anniversary although she did bring a bunch of grading to do in the hotel and said I could go play.

The Penn & Teller show was great. I'm really glad we saw them since they were very funny in addition to their magic. The thing I thought was the most funny was how they would redo tricks while explaining them and you would still be fooled! Of course some of the audience stunts, you wonder if they planted people, but some of them didn't matter. They had one where an audience guy transformed into Teller, didn't matter if he was planted or not. The show did seem a little short at just over an hour, but I had more than my money's worth of entertainment and was very happy about our choice for our first Vegas show.

Monday morning we went to the Rainforest Cafe for breakfast and then headed to the MGM Lion Habitat. This was pretty cool and you got to walk right under the lions. There was only 2 lions on display today and some of their lions are direct descendants of the original MGM lion. The trainers walk around in the habitat right next to the lions since they are so domesticated. It was cool to watch the lions nuzzle their trainers. The gift shop had all sorts of neat safari stuff and we bought a few things that we will use to decorate the kids room including a giraffe picture frame and a monkey. No we didn't get any lion stuff from the lion habitat because the only cool lion they had was really expensive.



After seeing the lions, we checked out and headed for home. Knowing the 15 would be terrible today, we headed north and headed through death valley via Beatty. We were home in just over 4 hours, but we stopped to get cheap gas in Beatty. If we didn't stop, I think we would have made it in 4 hours, which is pretty quick for the death valley route.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Lisa and Matt's visit 4-5 October, 2008

Lisa and Matt stopped by on Saturday to visit. After talking for a bit and watching the Brewers win, we went out to eat at Mon Reve, a fancy French restaurant. I remember the food being very good, but expensive, but this time it was very good, but with normal prices. We hadn't gone there in years because we thought the prices were still high, but we'll probably start heading there more often now. On the way home, we stopped by Stator Bros for some beer and wine, in the parking lot we noticed an incredible spare tire cover of Jesus and the Lamb of God, you have to see this picture.


After dinner we watched the presidential and vice presidential debates. It was pretty civil considering how politically different we are. I think its good to hear opposing ideas and rationale.

Monday morning we recorded the Packers game and watched the Brewers game while Michelle cooked waffles. Matt wanted to go see the airplane and go flying so we headed out to the airport. I wasn't sure if Lisa would want to go to the airport since she's already seen the airplane, but I offered her to come anyways and offered to come flying, but knew she wouldn't. As we were getting ready to head to the airport, Matt noticed the growler we have from Laura and Steve from the Kern River Brewing Company and that was enough for Matt to want to fly to Kernville to go to the brewery for lunch. Matt also pointed out that this was the weekend of our 1 year anniversary so it would be fitting to go to Kernville.

Once we got to the airport, I let them check out the airplane while I pre-flighted it. Lisa decided that she would actually try flying! I showed them a little bit of what I was doing as I did the pre-flight. I feel that new passengers are more comfortable when you explain what you are doing. After we added some gas, we started up, did the run-up, and we were headed for Kernville. The winds were calm and the air was relatively smooth meaning a few bumps, but not too bad for Inyokern. There were a few more bumps along the way as we climbed and flew through Walker's pass, but everybody did fine. I tried to keep explaining things as we flew such as "you'll hear the engine rev down as a increase the prop pitch for cruise."


After we cleared Walker's pass I let Matt fly for just a bit. I didn't let him fly too much because I didn't want to have any sudden movements that would cause extra nervousness. The wind was a bit stronger coming into Kernville, but it wasn't a big deal. After tying down the airplane, I got a rental car from the restaurant. They gave us the "White Chevy." I absolutely love courtesy cars (although this one requires a very minimal fee to cover insurance), so I'm not complaining, just telling the story.



The car started up fine, but as soon as I put it into gear, the belts started squealing and I noticed that the rear view mirror was broken off and laying on the dash. The head liner was hanging down and the ladies had to hold it up in the back so it wasn't down to their heads. I decided to roll down my window, which only added to the adventure. As I tried to roll it back up when we got to the brewery, it came out of the tracks and fell back down into the door, you just have to see the picture for this one. For the rest of the trip, the window would slide back and forth.



Lunch at the brewery was excellent as usual, I had the Kern Burger with no pickle onion or mayonnaise and Michelle had the Olympic Pita with no olives and provolone instead of feta cheese. Michelle didn't have any beer because of her condition and I didn't because I had to fly back; no alcohol from bottle to throttle... After the brewery we drove by Ewings a.k.a. the Broken Oar and Odd Fellows where we had our reception. Then we headed back to the airport since I was warning that the turbulence gets worse as the day goes on.



The flight back was just fine as well and I kept it pretty slow. This way the turbulence would wobble the airplane more the bang it around. The wobbles tend to get more people sick, but the banging around tends to scare more people. Nobody seemed to have any motion sickness problems so slow and wobbly was the way to go. The winds were still calm in Inyokern and we were all back safe and sound.

I'm so glad that I was able to take Matt up and go flying and that Lisa came up for the ride. I know this was way out of her comfort zone, but she thanked me for getting her out of her box. I hope that she was able to get comfortable enough to really enjoy the flight, I know it's difficult for nervous first time passengers. I'm very happy that the weather for the most part was cooperative since more turbulence would had ruined the experience for sure. No the pictures are not edited, she actually flew!

Saturday, October 4, 2008

It's an UNSURE!

We had the ultrasound yesterday morning that we were supposed to find out the sex of the baby. It turns out that it was positioned so they had to look through Michelle's belly button and it wouldn't open it's legs so he couldn't tell. He said if he had to guess, he'd call it a girl for now, but he said he really didn't know. The last ultrasound before this one he said he thought it was a boy, but it was too early to know for sure so we are still at 50/50. We are going in for a sonogram in 2 weeks so we'll have another chance then to find out.

Here is a link to the ultrasound pic if you want to see. The head is on the right and it has it's hand over it's mouth.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jayson.brouchoud/Baby?authkey=RVDuy5S0VIQ#5253327579089623250

Friday, October 3, 2008

Whitney GPS tracks

I just wrote about Kevin and I hiking Mt. Whitney. Kevin was nice enough to carry his GPS up there so I didn't have to carry mine. I have a Garmin 296 portable aviation GPS that is much bigger than Kevin's hiking Garmin etrex legend GPS. Unfortunately, the GPS lost track a lot due to having limited sky exposure at points. Some places had rock cliffs all around which made the GPS lose signal, but if you piece all the tracks together, it provides a pretty good track of the hike. There are a few spots that jump off the trail and I think those are from when the GPS got it's signal back, but the accuracy was still low. Here are some picks of the hike using Google Earth.


Overview of the trail



Top down view



View from Trail Camp including some of the switchbacks, which was just to the south (left) of the lake.


View of Mt. Whitney from Trail Camp.