With the Cherokee gone, we returned to rented airplanes. King Aviation at Van Nuys had two Cutlass RG's, and we rented one of them for another vacation to Oregon. The Cutlass had decent speed and enough range to make it to Medford nonstop. We expanded our horizons with a three-day side trip from Medford to Victoria, British Columbia -- our first international flight. 38V was recently sold to a new owner in Bellingham, WA, close to Victoria.
Total hours: 1366
Cheryl and I, along with my legal secretary (and future sister-in-law) rented a powerful Piper Dakota to travel to South Lake Tahoe for a legal seminar.
Total hours: 1393
A few weeks later we rented the same Dakota (by then re-registered N111MB) for a family vacation to visit Cheryl's brother and his family in west-central Oregon.
Total hours: 1401
That summer we returned to Oregon in a rented Skyhawk. Cheryl and the kids are shown at Cottage Grove, Oregon. From the airplane here we walked across the street to an excursion on the scenic Oregon, Pacific & Eastern Railway, on which the silent film The General and Lee Marvin's Emperor of The North Pole were filmed. The OP&E has since been abandoned.
Total hours: 1419
In 1986 we let the Dakota take us to places we had never been before; to Yellowstone National Park; and to Reno, where we visited relatives. N111MB is now based in Arizona. Total hours: 1446
Somehow my work schedule called for me to be in Bakersfield late one afternoon and in Prescott early the next morning. The only feasible way to make this work was (naturally) with a light airplane, in this case a rented Skyhawk. I departed BFL at 4 AM , and I'll never forget the sunrise over the Colorado River. N9408L is still based in Southern California.
Total hours: 1483
In 1989 I joined a large Los Angeles-area law firm whose senior partner, also a pilot, was happy to have me use rented airplanes for distant client meetings and court appearances. Van Nuys Flight Center had an excellent selection of Pipers and Mooneys in its rental fleet. This pretty Warrior was one of the newer ones. Years later it was destroyed in a bizarre fatal crash in Illinois.
Total hours: 1566
We borrowed my dad's 1978 Skyhawk for a trip to Portland, Oregon, for a family event. It was our first visit to Portland, and little did we know that six years later we would be living just a mile from the Portland International Airport, where the photo at right was taken.
To this day our boys say it was their favorite family vacation. We rented a Turbo Arrow from Van Nuys Flight Center for a round-robin trip in which we visited relatives in Oregon, spent three spectacular days at Glacier National Park, and celebrated July 4 in Silverton, Colorado, with a return flight over the Grand Canyon at 14,500 feet. The airplane's hydraulic system failed after takeoff from our last fuel stop, Kingman AZ, forcing us to fly all the back to Van Nuys with the landing gear down.
Total hours: 1741