Kevin and Shelvey Tajii's Wedding September 6th, 2008

This weekend Michelle and I flew up to San Jose for our friends Kevin and Shelvey's wedding. Kevin and Sarah Ford also flew up with us so we were able to planepool and save some money.

I needed to burn just a little gas so that we'd be under the maximum weight of the airplane so I flew for 15-20 minutes or so doing practice takeoffs and landings before we loaded the airplane for the trip. After burning the gas and checking what the Ford's brought for baggage, we were good to go. The trip was extremely smooth the whole way up there and I logged 1.9 hours on the tach including the practice takeoffs and landings.

I decided to fly into Reid-Hillview airport (add another to the map) since it would be cheaper and more convenient to fly into the San Jose International. After we got the rental car (which ended up being a huge extended cab truck since they were out of cars) we went and checked into the hotel early. Normally it would take 6+ hours to get up here not counting stopping for lunch, but were checked in to the hotel in less than 3.

After checking in, we headed up north to San Francisco to tour Alcatraz, but unfortunately the tours were sold out for the day, so we went to pier 39 instead. After getting some ice cream, we went and watched the sea lions. Sarah didn't have the best luck with her ice cream since a sea gull came down and snatched her cone right out of her hand. It dropped into the water and there was a frenzy with the birds. It scared the crap out of me since the sea gull just about hit me it came in so low, can't imagine Sarah since it DID hit her!

After pier 39, we went at drove past the famous Lombard street then headed back to the hotel. After a little swimming we were in bed for the night.

Saturday morning we went to tour the Winchester house. This is a crazy house that the widow of the second president of the Winchester gun company built since a psychic told her to keep building to appease the spirits of those killed by Winchester guns. Since she had to keep building the house at all times of day for decades, there were several unique features. A few interesting things were a staircase that went to all the way to a dead-end at the ceiling, a door out the second floor to nowhere, pillars mounted upside down, etc.




After the house it was time to get ready for the wedding. Unfortunately, we don't have many good pictures of the ceremony itself, but it was a good ceremony. I'll have to talk to Kevin when he comes back from their honeymoon about it. I thought they were going to do a traditional Buddhist wedding, but even though there were some unique parts, it seemed very traditional.




The wedding was fun and I didn't make a fool out of myself since I was the designated driver (only I was on the rental agreement).

Sunday we took off in the morning for the trip back. This trip was a little more interesting with much busier traffic coming out of the Bay and being swapped a lot by ATC while I was getting flight following updates. Then there was a jet that wasn't talking to anybody that was flying right at me. The controllers were finally able to reach him although he still seemed oblivious. While they were trying to figure out what he was doing, I climbed to 12,500 to get out of the way.

I was hoping to stop at Kernville for lunch, but there was a NOTAM that 100LL fuel was currently unavailable and I didn't have all the much fuel. I was worried if I descended all the way down there, I'd be too worried about our fuel level climbing back out to head home so we decided to skip Kernville and head home with 2.0 on the tach. This was Sarah's second trip that we weren't able to get lunch at Kernville, maybe we'll have to dedicate a trip some time...