Today wasn’t really about flying – it was about friends and cancer. I know that’s a strange thing to say in a travel journal about a flying trip, but it certainly weighed on my mind throughout the day.

I awoke to find the storms of the previous evening had completely blown over, leaving the skies clear and cold, much colder than I would have expected in Maryland this late in the Spring.

I departed VFR in compliance with the ADIZ rules, which really weren’t that unusual. Once clear of the ADIZ, I just turned on-course and proceeded on my way, which happened to take me over the rolling mountains just East of Washington, DC. Coming from the Pacific Northwest, anything under about 10,000’ barely qualifies as a mountain, so these little 3 and 4-thousand foot ridgelines seemed more like geological speedbumps than mountains, but then I wondered how difficult they would have been to pass two hundred and fifty years ago, so I now acknowledge them as mountains.

I was pleasantly surprised to find today that I was doing the impossible: I was westbound with a tailwind. With the unusually high tailwinds I had earlier this week, I just had assumed that of course there would be unseasonable headwinds on the return trip. Instead, I was treated to a average of about 10-15 knots on the tail.

One mistake I made early on was to see the sunshine, clear skies, and charts showing I was in the Tidewater, from all of which I deduced that the day would be warm – I coulnd’t have been more wrong. I was cold from the moment I took off, and it never got warmer. By the time I landed in Ohio, I was numb with cold. The outside air temperature, and hence native temperature in the cockpit, was 4 degrees C (about 37 degrees F). Although my electric heater helped keep the chill off my feet, the rest didn’t fare so well.

When I landed in Springfield, OH, I was met by Bob Walter, one of my old colleagues and friends from the late 90’s when we worked on some displays together. As I mentioned, a recurring theme today was cancer, and bob is one of its main victims: he lost his wife to cancer less than a year ago.

Bob and I had a great time reminiscing over a slow lunch. His job is satisfying, but he really seems to be happiest when raising his grandchildren

After lunch, I struck out on a 517-nm straight line to Olathe, KS. Out on the prairie, other than deviations for weather, military and civil airspace, and tall towers, there is no reason to do anything but a straight line. As I progressed towards the Kansas City are, the forecast was amended to indicate that although the region was suffering from “severe Clear”, there was a lower stratus layer in the vicinity.

Flying over the prairies is enough to make you wonder if maybe Columbus wasn’t wrong after all: maybe the Earth is flat. It is flat, monotonous, and never-ending. The most interesting sight I encountered on the ground was seeing the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home to the Indy 500, as I flew almost directly overhead.

This meant that I had to plan and file an IFR clearance request, pict it up with St. Louis center, then fly it. Fortunately, before I left Ohio, I had seen that the weather wasn’t great and I had picked up the approach plate for Olathe, allowing me to shoot the approach.

After wandering over the prairie all day on my own (can you really wander when flying a straight line via GPS for 600 miles?), it was kind of comforting to be handled by air traffic controllers. Yes, I like the freedom of going wherever I want under VFR, but when I am with a controller, I am significantly less concerned about mid-air collisions (the Big Sky theorem doesn’t work half as well as everyone would like to believe) and I know that if the engine quits, they will be able to figure out where I am in an instant and possibly help guide me to a safe landing place.

I broke out at about 2,100’ MSL on the approach, in plenty of time to see the field, so it was a no brainer. I taxied back to where my old hangar had been 10 years ago and shut down. Terry Yake had mailed me the key to his hangar, so I had a safe place for my plane, and he had left his truck there as well, so that I would have transportation.

After putting my plane away, I drove up to see Terry and Maggie. He’s been having a tough battle against pancreatic cancer, but seems to be fighting a good fight. Going to see someone with cancer is tough, as you never lnow what to expect or what to say once you get there. In this case, I was pleasantly surprised: the form that Terry has is one of the more uncommon, yet it offers much better survival rates and statistics than the other forms. Despite the rigors of chemotherapy, he is still the same old Terry.

Terry, Maggie and I sat and chatted for a while about flying homebuilt planes, some of the characters in our community, and the joys of building, owning and flying planes. Not a bad evening.

After that, I set out to see Pete and Farrell Rouse, another aviation die-hard who currently owns a Bonanza but keeps thinking about building a Long-EZ. I spent the night with them before heading back to the plane.

The one ironic aspect of the day was that after having successfully navigated myself all around the US, covering over 3,500 nautical miles so far on this trip, once on the ground, I demonstrated an amazing propensity for getting lost. Without the backup of a GPS and a good air sense, I am hopelessly lost on the ground.

Day’s Total Distance Covered:   830 nautical miles

Day’s Total Flight Time:  5 hours 20 minutes

Day’s average groundspeed:  155.72 knots

Day’s Flight legs: 2

Day’s Highest Altitude reached: 10,500’

Day’s Highest Groundspeed attained: 174 knots

Total Trip Distance Covered: 3,780 nm

Total Trip Flight Time: 23 hours, 36 minutes

Total Trip average groundspeed:  160.0 knots

In-flight food consumed today: 16-oz skim milk, cinnamon pop tarts, 16-oz coke

Other planes seen (outside of the terminal area): 6