Day 2 - Waterfalls, Airplane Rides and Appalachian Trail

Day 2 of our vacation, Saturday morning. We arose to dense fog in the valley which made for some beautiful scenery. Sandi and I hopped in the car with Missy and we headed out to go see some waterfalls. Our destination was Dry Falls. Along the way we stopped at some falls you could only see from the road but they were fantastic and we took some fantastic pictures. (Check out the photo gallery.) After admiring for a while, we continued on to Dry Falls, which really isn't so dry. A path leads down to the waterfall where you can walk behind the water. We spent some time taking more photo's (my sister is an amateur photographer). From Dry Falls we continued up the mountain to the town of Highlands. This is nice little boutique town with lots of high-end shopping, art galleries and such. We grabbed a bite to eat and some coffee and Bruce's Coffee shop. Sandwiches were quite good consisting of sliced chicken breast, blue cheese and sliced apples on a currant bread. Yum!

Morning fog

Waterfall

Back down the mountain we went and headed for the airport. Missy was actually going to get in our plane and go for a ride! Truly amazing since she is pretty much deathly afraid of flying. My sister is a missionary, so you'd think having traveled to over 25 different countries all over the world, she'd kinda be used to it... but she's not. She usually takes some sort of sedative so she doesn't get freaked out. So we strapped in and took off. Fortunately the air was smooth as glass with only a minor layer of bumps as we climbed out. We spent some time looking for the Inn she was staying at but couldn't ever find it exactly. I had the 'sic-sac' handy in case she needed it but she was having a lot of fun! We headed back after 30 minutes or so. Truly a pleasure giving my sister a ride. The only family member left to give a ride to would be my mom and I think the chances of that happening are remote.

Missy and I

Back in the car, we headed up another mountain called Wayeh Bald where the Appalachian Trail is. It had a great view of the valley and even the airport. I think the height was around 5,300 feet. (Airport elevation is 2,020ft.) We did see a few trail hikers taking a break.

Waterfall

Time to head back to the 'Inn' and meet my mother and her husband Gary who flew into Atlanta and drove up to Franklin. After a bite of dinner and a few games of 'carpet pool' and shuffle-board we called it a night.

Ottawa to Paris.. Non stop!

Paris, Tennessee that is.. :-0 The weather held out for us and we have arrived in Franklin, North Carolina! We are here to visit my sister Missy. She is a missionary currently 'resting' at a place called Christian Training International and staying and what is called the 'Inn'.

We left about 8:40am and made a stop about halfway in Paris, TN to stretch the legs and take a potty break. Met a gent name Tony Graziano who had a Zenith 701. After a short break, we hopped back in and continued east. Made our first 'mountain' approach and landing. The Macon County (1A5)airport is tucked right up against the Appalachian mountains. Field elevation is 2020 feet, mountain tops are at 5500 or so. We had ground speeds average about 170kts on the way here, running 2420 RPM most of the way. We saw as high as 177kts at one point. Beautiful country.... plan our return trip home on Sunday morning. Sandi is taking lots of pictures.

Short Final into Paris, TN

Short Final into Franklin, NC

RV Apparel

Prior to leaving for Oshkosh, Sandi purchased some polo's to have embroidered with our airplane, tail #, etc. We found two vendors there who did embroidary and only one of them would do it on our shirts, however, you had to use their design and just pick colors. Sandi was having none of that! If she was going to pay to have it done, it needed to look like our plane with our colors, so we brought our shirts back.

Sandi works for the Ottawa Area Chamber of Commerce so she called a new member "M&N Sportshop" about doing some shirts. Sandi took her down a design of the RV-9A and our colored drawing. A week later we had some fantastic looking polo's with our airplane, in our colors for cheap! I mean cheap! I'm going to go work with her to refine the image a little bit. I don't have pictures of our shirts yet but I'll get some soon. In the meantime, if you are interested, give them a call!

Grounded again!

.. and this time it wasn't necessarily weather. We had planned to depart on Friday afternoon around 5:00pm for Moline so Sandi could attend a baby shower. After 15 minutes of hem-hawing around about the winds (16-17 gusting 23) we loaded up and taxied out. After warming up the engine a bit, I did my mag check only to have the airplane shake like a wet dog when running on the left mag! Damn! We both noticed the last time we flew that the engine felt like it was running just a bit rough. We were hungry already, so we just stowed the plane away for the night. I looked at it Saturday morning and quickly discovered a spark plug wire hanging loose. I did know right where to look since the engine monitor told me the #2 EGT was running higher than the rest. I can only imagine that the last time I messed with the spark plugs, I didn't get that one tightened. I checked the rest and they were all good.

We did get a bit of good news though... we finally got high speed internet!! We live about 4 miles from town and have no high-speed internet options. A local guy has been setting up a wireless network to service us folks out in the rural areas that can't get DSL or Cable. He has a 6meg DSL service at the local coop and has several large antenna's on top.

So after getting that all hooked up and getting all the updates installed on our new Dell PC, which I bought to do flight-sim stuff on, I fired up MS Flight Simulator with Squawkbox (virtual ATC) and did some flying at Dulles, Miami and one other place. I gotta saw, I was pretty damn amazed. I was doing touch and go's at Miami and Dulles with 737's flying around and an ATC guy directing traffic. I also have X-Plane and have downloaded XSquawkbox to use with it.

Next scheduled trip is to Franklin, NC to visit my sister.

Giving rides...

Been awhile since an update, mostly because there hasn't been much flying. We've had plans but weather usually has killed them. Last weekend I gave my dad and his wife Linda there first ride in the RV. Dad flew it like he'd been flying one for years.

We have several trips planned in the near future... Moline, IL for a baby shower, then North Carolina to visit my sister the end of September and finally the Land Of Enchantment fly-in in Las Cruces, NM the middle of October.