Since we were planning on flying through Colorado on our trip home, we decided to leave Thursday and fly to Grand Junction so that we'd be able to fly through CO on Friday morning and avoid density altitude and turbulence issues through the Rockies. It looked like some weather was rolling into the area so I left work a little early and we got out before it started to rain. It was hot and turbulent, but that was expected. We bumped around for 4.6 hours and made it to Grand Junction. We had an issue at the airport because the FBO didn't want to let us exit through their building, which was the only way out due to TSA policy, because we didn't buy fuel from them. I didn't realize the FBO didn't own the self serve fuel pumps. Luckily the manager came out and was really nice and not only let us through, but gave us a ride into town and let us in the next morning.
After some breakfast, we took off for the "long day". The flight through the Rockies was smooth and easy and the scenery was excellent. We flew past the Great Sand Dunes National Park and landed at La Junta, CO to pick up some fuel. The scenery in La Junta was amazing flat, especially since we just flew the Rockies. From La Junta, we flew to Butler, MO then on to Belleville, IL. We had to dodge some cloud build-up on the last 2 legs, but the weather was pretty good overall.
After visiting family in Belleville, we flew up to Flying Cloud, MN to visit some college friends. We stopped at Rochester along the way for fuel.
I don't have a movie of our flight from Flying Cloud to South St. Paul to visit some more college friends, but it was a very short flight.
After our MN visits, we flew down to Madison, WI to visit my brother Jon and his family.
Due to thunderstorms, we were not able to fly to Kiel, WI to visit Joe, but we were able to spend some time with them later in our trip. We were planning on flying into Airventure again this year, but we were going to fly in formation this time with the Cessnas2Oshkosh group. The staging airport was Juneau, WI so that was our next stop. After eyeing a gap in the weather and seeing it get bigger and bigger, I decided to call flight service one more time (I had been calling them throughout the day) while we were out getting some lunch. The flight to Juneau is very short so I didn't need a big window, but I'm pretty conservative when it comes to flying. The next wave looked like it was all the way back over Dubuque, IA almost 100 miles away. Although the weather looked as if it were improving, the briefer said several things were aligning to produce a large storm including tornadoes. That was the first forecast of tornadoes, but that forecast was enough for us to head back home for the day. I decided to call Madison and see if they were able to put my airplane into a hanger. Just as the FBO returned my call saying they got it in the hanger, the tornado sirens started going off. There was something like 7 or 9 touchdowns within the county. The next day, we made our flight uneventfully into Juneau on an IFR flight plan through some minor clouds.
I don't have a video of my flight from Juneau to Waukesha, WI, but that was also in light IMC.
Mark and Carley wanted to go flying and take the kids, so I took them up in turns and we were able to find their house as well as a corn maze.
This was my first real flight in IMC. We entered the clouds around 1200 feet and I was IMC the until about 800 feet on approach.
I was able to take Joe and Amber up for a flight, we lucked out with some really smooth flying. We flew around Woodland Dunes for a bit, then headed over to Kiel and found their house.
All trips have to come to an end at some point, so we were on our way back home. We had to dodge some pretty big storms on the way and 1 of the legs ended up being 4.6 hours. I've got over 6 hours of fuel capacity so that wasn't an issue, but that's a long time flying without stopping. We had planned at stopping near Salt Lake City for the night, but stopped short and landed at Evanston, WY due to thunderstorms. We lucked out coming into Evanston because thunderstorms were popping up in the area, but there none between us and the airport, although one wasn't very far to the north. You can see some lightening in the movie if you watch closely.
After 42.7 hours of flying over 22 days, we finally made it home.
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