What a treat it was to attend our son Tim's opening service as Senior Pastor of The Bridge Community Church in Mesa, Arizona. We spent a delightful week with Tim, his wife Judi and our grandson Ryan, with a side trip to Sedona and the Grand Canyon. That's Ryan on the cover of the church's brochure, at upper right. When we touched down at Williams-Gateway Airport, the former Air Force base in Mesa, it marked the thirteenth state visited by the Cheetah during 2002. The photo at lower right shows N365PS saddled up for a dawn departure from Williams-Gateway for the nine-hour return trip to Washington State.
Total hours: 2981
Can there be a better use for an airplane than to visit a grandchild more often? Thanks to the Cheetah we were able to share Ryan's second birthday in Arizona. Weather was clear but cool throughout the western US for the entire five-day round trip.
Total hours: 3031
As much as we loved the Cheetah, our mission requirements changed once we realized that Phoenix would be a regular destination. With a second grandchild on the way, these trips will be even more frequent. We needed something that would reduce the time enroute, and the number of intermediate fuel stops. Soon we learned of a 1959 K35 Bonanza for sale at Grants Pass, saw it, and put a deposit on it. Regretfully we put the Cheetah on the market. Our entire advertising campaign consisted of one e-mail to the Grumman Gang listserve, and a page on this website. Within a few hours we heard from a USN P-3 pilot at Whidbey Island NAS, and a few days later I flew to BVS to show him the airplane. He bought it.
I took an early Horizon Dash-8 flight to Medford, where Walt picked me up in the Bonanza (shown). We flew it back to Grants Pass, did the paperwork, and I flew home as a Bonanza owner.
This was the Bonanza's shakedown cruise, our first trip with it to Arizona, and it performed well. Thunderstorms in Nevada forced us the long way around through California southbound, and being extra conservative until we were familiar with the airplane's fuel consumption, we made two fuel stops. On the way home, however, good weather allowed a nearly direct route home over the Grand Canyon and through eastern Nevada, with only one fuel stop and total tach time enroute of 6.1 hours.
Excellent weather and a good-performing airplane made for an easy overnight trip to Southern California to hear Tim preach at The Church at Rocky Peak, and to visit 95-year-old Aunt Helen. There was only one glitch. A faulty alternator on the return trip from Van Nuys forced us to shut off the electrical system to save battery power. Fortunately it was an easy problem to handle in flight, and it turned out to be an easy and inexpensive repair once we got home. This was only the second time we have had to use the battery-operated hand-held transceiver; the other time was on our first trip to Van Nuys in the Cheetah, also over a July 4 weekend, exactly four years earlier.
Of all the flights listed on these pages, this is the only one in which I was but a backseat passenger -- but it was certainly memorable nonetheless. As part of an Alaska vacation via airline, rail and cruise ship, we bought a flightseeing ride in one of Talkeetna Air Taxi's ski-equipped Cessna 185s to the south face of 20,230-ft. Mt. McKinley. Weather was spectacular, and the air on the lee side of the huge mountain was surprisingly smooth.
For over forty years I have been a fan of the music of Randy Sparks and The New Christy Minstrels. Through a remarkable turn of events I found myself producer of a Randy Sparks & The Minstrels concert in Vancouver, Washington. The group performed in Missoula, Montana, a week before our concert, so I flew to MSO for the festivities there. It was an opportunity to help Missoula producer Barb Evans with show-day chores, to coordinate last-minute details for the Vancouver concert, and to sit back and enjoy a great show. Unfortunately flying into and out of MSO was anything but scenic. Wildfires all around western Montana threw a pall of smoke over the state that reduced visibility at MSO to 2-1/2 miles when I landed there, necessitating an instrument approach. By the way, the Vancouver concert of Randy Sparks & The Minstrels (with original Minstrels Barry McGuire and Clarence Treat) the following weekend in Vancouver was a sellout and a huge success.
It would be difficult to imagine a single long weekend with a wider range of activities, emotions, climate and topography. We departed IFR from Pearson early Friday afternoon in a cool, light drizzle, and climbed above the cloud deck to 11,000 feet for a smooth, clear flight to Van Nuys. As we began the descent into Van Nuys, we glanced westward toward Simi Valley and the setting sun (upper right). At that moment the burial ceremony for former President Ronald Reagan was in progress at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, where our friend Michael Reagan delivered a stirring eulogy for his father. A temporary flight restriction extended for a 30 NM radius around the ceremony, and only air traffic such as ourselves, on active flight plans and in contact with ATC, were allowed in the area. The airspace around VNY is normally hectic on a sunny Friday afternoon, but on this occasion we were the only traffic on the frequency. On Saturday morning we visited with Mike & Colleen Reagan at breakfast at the Hotel Bel-Air (below left). There they shared with us their experiences of the solemn week gone by, while Lady Margaret Thatcher walked by just a few yards away. Saturday evening the tone was much lighter, as we attended a Randy Sparks & The Minstrels concert (below center) at a small coffee house in Altadena (to borrow one of Randy's lyrics, "... ain't comin' home til twelve fifteen!"). Sunday morning we attended The Church on The Way in Van Nuys, then took off for a two-day visit with Tim, Judi and the grandkids at the La Paloma Resort in Tucson, Arizona (center right). Judi had planned the stay at the resort to celebrate Tim's 30th birthday, their anniversary and our anniversary. In contrast to the cool, wet weather back home in the Northwest, it was clear and quite hot in Arizona. When it was time to return home, gathering thunderstorms throughout Nevada and Utah dictated that we take the longer route home through the Central Valley of California. The 1195-NM route, with headwinds, required two fuel stops and over eight hours elapsed time enroute.
