ewein2412 | Entries tagged with #flight across america

I write this sitting on the Mt. Gretna porch in Pennsylvania.

It was so weird flying back to the east coast on United 2213, from Orange County airport to Newark, in less than five hours, yesterday.

On Friday, however, it took us close to that same amount of time to fly from Deming, New Mexico, to Yuma, Arizona – with a stop at Gila Bend to refuel. YES, THAT GILA BEND! This is the first place we landed on our trip east three weeks earlier, the place with the spider and the disintegrating fire engine and no transport. They do, however, have fuel, and it was the perfect stop to fill up and do some flight planning for a few hours before continuing on to Yuma. Lunch in Gila Bend was what we had with us: four peanut butter crackers, a couple of cookies, some peanut brittle and a breakfast bar.

And Yuma was wonderful. We stayed in an ancient motor hotel, the Coronado, stucco roofs and poolside palms and bougainvillea.

Coronado Motor Hotel, Yuma, AZ

The hotel had a deal with the restaurant next door, the Yuma Landing, named for Robert G. Fowler – who in 1911 landed a plane in Arizona for the first time RIGHT THERE. He, too, was on a cross country trip – the first flyer to cross the continent from west to east.

Shaking hands with fellow trans-continental flyer Robert G. Fowler

And it turns out that Yuma was also the second stop on the 1929 Women’s Air Derby, and Amelia Earhart pranged her propeller here and the entire race got held up while it was being fixed.

We also got held up here, because the wind was too strong for us after our El Paso to Deming experience. We were now pretty wary of crossing the desert in heat and high wind. So we rented a car and saw some tourist sights instead. Chief among them were the Imperial Sand Dunes, California, which looked like Tatooine, mainly because it *IS* Tatooine – Return of the Jedi was filmed here, as was Lawrence of Arabia.

Imperial Sand Dunes

We then drove in the opposite direction to Fishers Landing, Arizona (Yuma is on the California border, or rather, on the Colorado River – we walked there from our hotel – and only seven miles from the Mexican border).

Fishers Landing is a marina on the Colorado River. We realized, as we drove closer, that the huge plumes of smoke we’d seen from sixty miles away in California were probably not connected to the nearby army training center, but were something else and very close to where we were headed.

Apocalyptic landscape in Arizona

It felt apocalyptic. No one in Fishers Landing gave a heck. I asked a server in the Rio Loco bar and grill, “What’s going on?” and she just shrugged and said, “We have no idea.” Someone else suggested in was a fire caused by a motorboat running aground in “the toolies,” apparently a local term for “the boonies” or “the sticks.” After we’d eaten our lunch, the plume of smoke was even bigger, so we decided to get as far away from it as we could before everyone started to panic.

On our way back to Yuma we discovered what might be my FAVORITE MUSEUM EVER, the “Cloud Museum” in Bard, California. It is a collection of about a gazillion rusting Model T and Model A Fords, along with maybe 50 beautifully restored vehicles of the same era, all belonging to local resident Johnny Cloud and sitting on his property, along with the former Bard post office which is incorporated wholesale into the museum.

Model Ts at the Cloud Museum, Bard, California

The displays also include a bunch of ancient baby buggies, bicycles, a 1930s school bus and fire engine, a full service gas station, a 1930 Ford Motor Home, and hundreds of ancient glass bottles and electrical insulators.

1920s gas station at the Cloud Museum

I absolutely loved it. In trying to describe it to my niece, later, I realized that the guy is a hoarder – but what he hoards is MODEL T FORDS. My mind, it was blown.

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The next day, we headed out of Yuma, but not before I overheard in the local airport office someone mentioning that fire in “the toolies.” So I ended up finding out from the horse’s mouth, a helicopter pilot named Rick, that it had been a wildfire and that he’d actually been battling it all afternoon the day before in his S61 helicopter, siphoning water from Martinez Lake and dumping it in 700 gallon drops. He was waiting for his next assignment.

Rick's S61 firefighting helicopter

The fire was still burning as we took off, 24 hours later. Rick was wonderful. I said, “Please let me shake your hand and say thank you.” He accepted hugs, too.

We could still see the smoke, spread about the Colorado River valley, as we flew away from Yuma. Guys like Rick are heroes.

Arizona desert wildfire THE NEXT DAY, from the air

We flew to Thermal, California (near Palm Springs), which is below sea level. Completely by coincidence – AGAIN – it turned out that this airfield is named for Jackie Cochran; she lived in the next town, Coachella, for many years, founding the Coachella Chapter of the 99s (the International Organization of Women Pilots, of which I am a member). She was, of course, also one of the founding members of the WASP (Women’s Air Force Service Pilots). What are the chances!

We had lunch there, waited two hours for the mist to burn off the California coast, and then flew on to Santa Monica. And that was the nearest airport to the Pacific Ocean that we could get to.

Approach to Santa Monica Airport, California

We landed, refueled, borrowed the airport courtesy car, and drove to the beach.

The Pacific Ocean!

We’d made it – from the west coast to the east, and back!

It took us 48 hours of flight time.

Our final flight of the evening was back to Corona. We landed with the setting sun in our eyes.

California sunset

Doug the engineer was waiting to greet us and to make sure we hadn’t damaged his plane. The Flying Academy folks had all been watching us on flight radar, and spotted us flying overhead earlier in the afternoon without landing, wondering where we were headed.

Only in hindsight do I realize that entirely by accident we almost exactly retraced the 1929 Women’s Air Derby in reverse on our way back from Texas, landing in Abilene, Pecos, El Paso, Yuma, and Santa Monica. And of course we also landed in Phoenix, another 1929 race stop, on our way out. So much of this wonderful trip retraced the airways of famous aviators entirely by accident. And yet it doesn’t feel like accident at all. We are following in their footsteps.

N991BJ, One Bravo Juliet, our Julie, was in the air again the next morning, training the next generation of aviators.

Farewell Julie <3

1942 airport beacon at Deming, New Mexico

We landed in El Paso on Wednesday and suddenly couldn’t steer the plane down the runway.

“Exit the runway at Uniform 2 and taxi via Hotel,” came the call, or something similar, and we were like, “Um, can we exit here at Yankee and shut down to inspect the nose wheel?"

The ground controllers and crew could not have been more helpful. They gave us permission to block the taxiway, directed aircraft around us, and I hopped out and discovered we had a flat nose-wheel tire.

There wasn’t anything to do but get the plane towed to an engineering workshop – and so we sat out on the runway while equipment and assistance were summoned to help us It took a long time – those runways are about a mile long. We got to ride in the escort vehicle with Erica, the airport operations supervisor, who drove about five miles an hour while poor Julie got towed by the cart behind us.

N991BJ under tow

We were the second small aircraft to come in to El Paso with a flat tire in the last half an hour! And when I admired the shining old DC-3 parked out in front of one of the hangars, Erica said, “Oh, they had a flat tire too!”

No doubt the DC-3 tire wasn’t as easily replaced as ours. We were able to take off again the next morning, but found ourselves battling to hold our altitude – it was the most turbulent flight we’d experienced during the whole trip. We’d been aiming for Tucson, but after traveling across the desert in stifling heat and being lifted 700 feet in 30 seconds, and finding little relief as high as 10,500 feet, we decided we’d be better off on the ground.

Dust devils on the way into Deming, New Mexico

We diverted to Deming, New Mexico – as with Mississippi, we’d flown over New Mexico but hadn’t intended to stop there! But we were very happy to be on the ground in this surprising green desert oasis full of pecan groves.

There was an airport beacon here which I believe dates to 1942 and which I thought was extremely cool. The airport office had pet cats and rattlesnakes.

Identity unknown

Mumma

Pecan groves in Deming, New Mexico

Bringing you the latest from Deming, New Mexico, where we landed this afternoon after an epic visit to El Paso, Texas. More about that in the next instalment – I need to catch up with the beginning of the week!

One Bravo Juliet got her fifty-hour check (essentially a tune-up) on Monday with the excellent Steve McCleod of McCleod Engineering at the Texas State Technical College airport in Waco (TSTC), so we had time to do a bit more sightseeing in Waco (where we have spent a total of three nights on this trip – indeed, we’ve spent an entire week in Texas overall!). The first stop on the morning’s tour was the Texas Ranger Museum and Hall of Fame and I think I learned more there and gained more of an understanding about American history than I’ve learned since high school. That is, Rangers as in The Lone Ranger (I GET IT NOW) – Texas’s own militia, as it were, from 1823 – they just celebrated their 200th anniversary. The museum also gave me much-needed insight as to how and why the thing we call “gun culture” became so ingrained in this country. The gangster bank robbers of the 1930s, with their sawed-off shotguns and submachine guns, were around within living memory. Just barely, but still! There was a fascinating display here on Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, aka the gangsters Bonnie & Clyde; and I was also intrigued by Miriam aka Ma Ferguson, Texas’s first woman governor, elected in 1924, and by Cynthia Ann Parker (no relation to Bonnie), captured by Comanches in 1836 at the age of nine in and who later married the chief Peta Nocona and whose son, Quanah Parker, was the Comanches’ last war chief. Tons of varied and intriguing history here.

Downtown Waco, Texas

We arrived back at TSTC just in time to watch a B-29 bomber landing to refuel during a training flight. The B-29 is a warbird dating to 1944; it flew the bombing missions over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and there are only two still flying in the whole world, and this was one of them. We fueled up at the same time (it took a bit more fuel than we did; we can carry 40 gallons max – they took on a thousand!), and then they flew several take-off and landings, so that we ended up taxiing at the same time. The pictures are not great but they are COOL.

One Bravo Juliet sharing the airfield at TSTC Waco with a B-29

It was taxiing with us as we took off!

We flew to Abilene that night, where we stayed in a highway hotel, and the next day we made a quick hop to Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, where the WASPs – the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots – did their training in 1943 and 1944.

Landing at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas. The WASP Museum is the two hangars to the right of the runway.

Ok, it was extremely cool to land at Avenger Field. We did not realize that the local airport and the WASP Museum do not really have access to each other, and we had to walk about a mile around the airport perimeter to get to the museum. https://www.waspmuseum.org/ It was worth the effort, though, to see so much commemorative memorabilia and information in their two hangars; among other things all their aircraft still fly, performing in airshows, and they have a “Link trainer,” the 1940s version of FlightSim. Allison Marlett, the gift shop manager, could not have been more helpful, and in addition to enthusing over aviation literature, she drove us back to the Fixed Base Operator where we’d left the plane.

One Bravo Juliet at Avenger Field, in Sweetwater, Texas

We then spent a few hours planning and waiting for the wind to change. There we ran into a couple of Jamaican pilots ferrying a plane to its new owner in the Caribbean. They’d landed at Avenger Field to check some issues with the plane. We recommended Steve McCleod!

I loved the light below and above this layer of haze as we crossed Texas.

Our final stop for the day was in Pecos, Texas. I confess that this really felt like the middle of nowhere. When we discovered that the airport courtesy car was leaking oil, we returned it and walked to the nearest hotel. We have walked a LOT in Texas, mostly along highway access roads and sometimes carrying our luggage and getting very dusty. This feels to me a little bit like living the Woody Guthrie dream.

Typical Texas transport: the white pick-up. I have driven a couple of these myself when provided as airport courtesy cars! (We didn't stay here; there was No Room at the Inn.)

We spent Friday in Clinton, Mississippi, avoiding Weather, and continued our trip west on Saturday, This time we ended up in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The Mighty Mississippi, at the Mississippi/Louisiana state line

You guessed it: lunch included more catfish. Shreveport is on the Red River, where the “Great Raft,” a 600-year-old log jam eight miles wide, was dismantled by the US Army Corps of Engineers led by Henry Miller Shreve between 1833 and 1838 (don’t quote me on these facts, I am not an expert). We walked over the steel truss bridge built in 1933 and gaped at the casinos.

Train over the Red River, Shreveport, Louisiana. This train was 153 cars long.

The live music that night was a phenomenal R&B band in the Noble Savage, who deserved a much bigger audience, but I was really blown away by their performance of Duke Ellington’s “Diga Diga Doo” and the youthful couple who leaped out of their seats and spontaneously began to dance the Lindy Hop like it was 1928.

On Sunday morning we joined fellow change ringers Candace and Edwin Higginbotham to ring the bells at St. Mark’s Cathedral for their Sunday church service! It was such a thrill to be able to help them out (their band is a little on the thin side at the moment), and so wonderful how welcoming bell ringers are. We’d never met before, but we had so much and so many friends in common. Candace and Edwin took us out to lunch – turns out their hospitality is legendary. It was such an unexpected treat and we’re hoping they make it to Scotland some day.

Ringing down at St. Mark's Cathedral, Shreveport

After ringing and lunch, we flew on during the hottest part of the day back to Waco, Texas. We are hoping to make our way back west in a leisurely manner over the next week.

With Shreveport ringers Candace and Edwin Higginbotham

That's the Atlantic Ocean!

After being stuck in the Golden Isles for three days to avoid bad weather, which was really like being on a three-day beach vacation, we are now on our way back west. We set out on Wednesday with the intention of getting some miles between us and the Atlantic, but first we did a little scenic tour of the Georgia coast. We turned west over Savannah, and landed in Cochran, Georgia, for lunch. Another airport courtesy car took us to Scott’s BBQ – we didn’t want to miss a local delicacy!

Alabama woodland. I am fascinated by the way you can see a river's ancient meanders from the air by the different vegetation growing in the soil laid down there.

We had to wait around a few hours for the wind to die down a bit before we headed out again. Choosing the next stop, Tim pointed to an airport in Alabama on the aviation map marked “Moton Field.” He said, “What about this place?”

I said – “Moton Field – that’s Tuskegee!”

“Oh yes,” says he, “That’s the nearest town.”

“No – I mean, Moton Field is where the Tuskegee Airmen all learned to fly!”

So of course we HAD to go there.

Now, if you’ve read American Wings, the non-fiction book that Sherri L. Smith and I collaborated on, you may recall that one of our heroes, John C. Robinson, was a graduate of Tuskegee Institute. In fact, he graduated exactly 100 years ago, in May 1924. With fellow aviators Cornelius Coffey and Grover Nash, in two planes, Johnny set out to travel by air to his tenth college reunion in May of 1934 (Robert Russa Moton, whom the airfield is now named for, was president of Tuskegee at the time). There was one major mishap on the way, caused by Johnny’s own cavalier airmanship, which wrecked the plane he was flying. He continued on to Tuskegee in Nash’s plane, becoming probably the first flyer ever to land there, touching down in an oat field connected to Tuskegee’s School of Agriculture on May 22, 1934.

Moton Field at Tuskegee in 1942, and in 2024. One Juliet Bravo is peeking out at right behind the sand pile!

On May 15, 2024, Tim and I landed at Moton Field almost exactly ninety years later. Fortunately our trip has been less eventful than Johnny Robinson’s, all those years ago! We were able to visit the wonderful museum there, dedicated to the Tuskegee Airmen and managed by the National Park Service. I wish I could say I planned this all along. But I didn’t, because in our initial plans last winter, we never intended to fly so far south. Kismet!

Moton Field from the old Tuskegee control tower. One Bravo Juliet is the plane at the far right.

We spent the night in Auburn, Alabama, not far from Tuskegee, and our first stop on Thursday was Meridian, Mississippi. Here we had our most exciting landing, as we slotted in between the Navy “Eagles” Training Squadron 7’s T-45 jets – apparently the Meridian civilian airfield has discovered it can tempt Navy pilots to land there by offering them free food! It was offered to us, too, in quantity – hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream, coffee, sweet tea, and fresh fruit. We hadn’t actually had a real meal since our pulled-pork BBQ at lunch time the day before, so we wolfed it down alongside the young Navy combat pilots who were debriefing there.

Julie among the fighter pilots - she is second from the right

Next we headed to Vicksburg, Mississippi, but we didn’t make it that far. Rain and storms were rolling in from the west, and we diverted to Clinton, Mississippi, which is where we are now. Apparently one of its claims to fame is that Charles Lindbergh landed in a field here in 1925 because he needed to refuel, buying gas at the local bike shop, so I guess we have that in common – landing in Clinton to avoid an aviation incident!

That's our shadow at bottom left, taking off from St. Simon's airport over the Retreat Golf Course

We are on the East Coast!

We said we wanted to fly across America some day, and we did it!

Louisiana coast

We’d intended to do two legs on Saturday, meaning to take off from Hammond, Louisiana, and end up in Tallahassee, Florida, with a brief hop on Sunday to our revised destination of St. Simon’s Island. We planned to stop for lunch in Andalusia, Alabama.

The flight from Hammond to Andalusia was notable because we made a little detour so that we could overfly Gulfport, Mississippi, the hometown of John C. Robinson, one of the heroes of American Wings (which Sherri L. Smith and I co-authored and which was published earlier this year). Johnny was inspired to take to the air when he saw his first plane in about 1910, winging its way over the Mississippi Sound just as we were. It seemed so appropriate to do a flyover thinking of the man who performed the first flyover honoring Bessie Coleman!

Gulfport, Mississippi, where Johnny Robinson saw his first airplane in the same sky in 1910

In Andalusia we borrowed the airport’s courtesy car for a couple of hours to go have lunch. We’d been recommended a place in town, but on the highway I spotted a sign advertising “David’s Catfish House, All You Can Eat Catfish and Shrimp,” and I was like, TAKE ME THERE. It totally lived up to expectations, a barn-like shed decorated with memorabilia, and we had gumbo and fried green tomatoes and fried pickles and a catfish po’boy, and a very local type of beignet which is heavy on cinnamon, and this is probably the point at which we realized and accepted that this trip is as much about the food as it is about the flying!

The manager, Bill Spurlin, was interested in our story and our trip. He came over to our table twice to chat with us, taking a look at the FlightAware tracker on Tim’s tablet, and eventually mentioned that he ran an AirBnB which was currently available. We politely declined, still thinking of moving on; then, as we finished our lunch, we thought, why not?

So we stayed in Alabama that night, in the loveliest new-built old-style bungalow – “Quaint on Third” – with our own porch and garden. After a great chat with Bill’s wife Charlotte, who turned out to be a librarian at the local high school (!), we walked into town and listened to more live music – this time a local woman singing country songs and accompanying herself with gorgeous guitar playing. Andalusia’s claim to fame is that Hank and Audrey Williams got married there on Dec. 15, 1944.

Three Notch Road, Andalusia, Alabama

The next morning – Sunday – we flew a single long leg to St. Simon’s Island in Georgia’s Golden Isles. The air was like silk, utterly smooth – at one point I flew hands off for five minutes, laughing, perfectly in trim, perfectly holding our course with my feet on the rudder pedals. This is flying!

And here we are on the Atlantic.

We rented bicycles and rode them on the beach and swam and ate flounder and soft shelled crab at the Crab Trap, and drank champagne on the balcony of our very local hotel room.

Evening beach, St. Simon's Island, Georgia

Now we have to fly back to California to return the plane - but we are stuck here for two days because it is raining! It is a lovely place to be stuck – like being on holiday.

Which we are.

People keep asking us “Where have you come from and how long are you staying?” And the nature of our story means that we struggle to give sensible answers. Increasingly I feel that we just drop out of the sky – like the crew of the Starship Enterprise or the occupants of the Tardis, or perhaps time travellers, we just teleport into a new place every day and look around blinking. Who are these people, where can we stay, how will they welcome us? They always welcome us wonderfully, but the feeling of being random strangers from another world is very strong.

We flew across the USA from west to east!

I write this sitting on a porch in Andalusia, Alabama, but I’m two days behind with my record-keeping so you’ll have to tune in tomorrow to find out how we got here!

Thursday was a downtime day because of weather. We stayed another night in Waco. But this meant that my Air Force friend and longtime Code Name Verity fan Jen was able to drive up from San Antonio to see us, meet One Bravo Juliet, be our chauffeur for the day, visit the Waco Mammoth National Monument, eat ice cream, and drink mojitos with us.

Jen & E Wein

We covered a lot of ground on Friday to make up for our day of rest (such as it was!). The first leg took us direct to Natchitoches (pronounced NACK-ih-tish), Louisiana. We finally made it out of Texas! East of Waco the Texan landscape was so much more forgiving and green than in the west, but there were still plenty of oil fields here and there.

Oil wells east of Waco

Natchitoches turns out to be the oldest city in Louisiana, with a gorgeous main street overlooking the Cane River. We were given the keys to another airfield courtesy car, this one of dubious age and condition (I’d guess early 1990s), and the airfield staff also recommended an amazing lunch place – Mayeux’s Steak and Seafood, where I reluctantly eschewed both the catfish and the soft-shelled crab (two of my favorites) for the local delicacy of fried crawfish tails. We also had blackened alligator. I reckon we have to try local stuff. I have no regrets.

"Louisiana's oldest general store," Natchitoches

Natchitoches was getting ready for their annual jazz festival, which opened with a street party that evening. They were setting up for it as we walked along the riverfront, and we were mighty tempted to stay the night. But the hotels were all completely full and we decided to put some distance behind us and go on to Hammond.

Farewell Natchitoches!

The Red River, Louisiana

(Cue The Roches and Whim’n’Rhythm, “If you go down to Hammond,” stuck in my head for the next 24 hours.)

And here we felt that virtue is its own reward. The folk at Northshore Airport in Hammond quite literally rolled out a red carpet for us to step out of our plane onto. The airport manager recommended that we try a place call Mariner’s for dinner, where we sat outside and I had broiled catfish and AMAZING chocolate pie (in fact it was “Milky Way” pie OMG), and there was a very laid-back live jazz band. So I got my catfish and jazz and an extra hundred miles in to boot.

Hammond treating visitors well!

“Nous demandons à boire, mais nous demandons aussi à communiquer.”
(“We need to drink, but also we need to communicate.”)
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry

It’s one of my favorite literary aviation quotations – the pilot, rescued from a crash in the desert, describes his love for the stranger who brings him water. And my favorite literary aviation moment occurs in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Listen! The Wind, when, after a night of blind flying across the south Atlantic in a small plane, she and her pilot husband buzz the ship Westfalia with whom they have been in radio communication all night. All the sailors are on deck waving at them as they swoop down to wave back. I often think about their final radio message from the small airport in the Cape Verde Islands as they set out on that trip: “We listen for you always.”

Tim and I said our goodbyes yesterday morning in Big Spring and thanked the incredibly welcoming Mike and Sophia again and again. As we taxied past the McMahon-Wrinkle air terminal on our way to the runway, Tim said to me, “Wave as we go by.” So I did, for a long time, though we were already too far from the terminal for me to see through the windows. There were two other planes in the circuit and the radio was full of their traffic calls and of our own. Suddenly, in between these calls, the airport director’s voice came through to say: “Sophia waved back.”

Sophia waved back!

It's just impossible to say how much this moves me.

THIS is what makes us human – our ability to communicate across space and through time.

I was neither looking for such a moment nor expecting it. But I think it may be the highlight of my entire trip – those three words over the radio. Sophia waved back.

“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
- Antoine de St. Exupéry

(pause to mop up)

Well! From the sublime to the ridiculous - there actually WAS a gopher on the runway as we took off.

We left Big Spring and flew over increasingly green countryside, to land at Texas State Technical College airport in Waco, Texas, last night. There, the ground staff noticed even before we shut down that One Bravo Juliet’s wheel struts were uneven. The kind and brilliant engineers here had this fixed within two hours. (Someone, not one of them, suggested that an acceptable fix for this problem is to jump up and down on the wing. We don’t believe this is an FAA approved procedure and are ignorant as to exactly where, how hard, and what the required footwear would be, so we didn’t try that.)

One of my two very dearest high school friends, Kristyn, drove an hour after work from Harker Heights and spent the evening with us in the bar of our Holiday Inn. And yes. “We need to drink, but also we need to communicate.”

E. Wein (Harrisburg Academy '82) and Kristyn (Harrisburg Academy '83)

Our morning in El Paso included our second really classic early 20th century US Post Office, which we now seem to be collecting (there was one in Phoenix, too), and a ride on El Paso’s amazing restored trolley cars which were built in 1937. We stopped in a big Western wear department store where I did not buy cowboy boots, but really wished I had room for souvenirs (it felt like the Texan equivalent of House of Bruar, which sells Scottish country wear).

A streetcar named Glory Road

Growing more familiar with Julie’s quirks means that we are able to fly more efficiently, so instead of trying to force her up to 9500 feet, we let her make her way there in a leisurely manner. What I really noticed from the air on our way from El Paso to Big Spring, Texas, was how much our land use is really ALL ABOUT POWER. The solar farms gave way to wind farms and then to oil fields, all stretching to the horizon.

Texas energy

We chose Big Spring as a destination because of the wind and the runways and it was about the right distance and in roughly the right direction. Nobody answered as we announced our intentions over the radio as we came in to land, and there were no other planes visible anywhere around the place, so we headed into the air terminal expecting a repeat of Gila Bend.

NOTHING COULD HAVE BEEN MORE OF A CONTRAST! We were greeted by Mcmahon-Wrinkle airport director Mike Feeley and his young receptionist Sophia, who plied us with free bottled water and snacks and coffee, handed us the keys to a courtesy car (no charge for anything except the aviation fuel), and pointed us to the most amazing local hotel, the Settles, which was recently fully restored to its 1930s deco glory and is 20 stories tall, towering like a monolith over everything in the small town around it.

The Settles Hotel and Big Spring, Texas

And the view from the ground.

The Settles Hotel

It took us a while to get there because I was getting my kicks driving around the airport in their Ford Escape, and then of course we had to stop to take multiple pictures of the gophers that absolutely infest the place.

We ate incredibly delicious beef skewers and charro beans, and for breakfast this morning we headed to Estella’s Country Café which is a tiny place on US Business 87, with six white Toyota pick-ups parked in front of it, and had huevos rancheros and limitless coffee.

On to Waco!

Prairie dogs at McMahon-Wrinkle airport, Big Spring, Texas

We wandered around downtown Phoenix in the morning waiting for the weather to clear and the winds to settle further east, then flew at 9500 feet most of the way from Phoenix to El Paso. Here’s what was notable today:

1) Tim tried to taxi down a service road instead of a taxiway at Phoenix Sky Harbor, and the ground staff and controllers were extremely sympathetic in pointing us in the right direction.

2) Our three-hour-flight was without incident except that we discovered Julie climbs VERY SLOWLY in heat and high altitude. We are getting used to this now and are figuring out little tricks to help her up, as well as just being patient.

3) There is NOTHING OUT THERE. OMG. Arizona and west Texas (and a little bit of New Mexico) – SO BARE! We did see some more solar farms and a few wind farms as well.

This is America

4) It was windy coming into El Paso and the controller was a bit concerned. Tim and I were both – what, 15 knots 10 degrees off the runway? That is a normal day at Perth in Scotland! (It was bumpy coming down but it was fine.)

One Brave Juliet at sunset, El Paso, Texas

We arrived pretty late in the evening and didn’t really have time or energy for anything except supper and bed. The FBO (“fixed-base operator”) we parked with in El Paso could not have been nicer. They drove us to the local Marriott and recommended we eat supper at Cattle Baron across the street. So we did, and I had catfish, which was delicious.

When I lie in bed at night and close my eyes, I feel like I am floating gently up and down.

We actually REALLY DID start our trip yesterday, and this morning we are in Phoenix!

We didn’t plan to be in Phoenix. We planned to spend the night in Gila Bend, Arizona, and indeed that’s where we landed, after routing through the Banning Pass, past Palm Springs, California, high over very barren desert country and across the Colorado River, to Gila Bend Municipal Airport. The wind was stronger and bumpier than we expected on landing (but no worse than the past month at Perth!).

Solar farms in California

We landed and refueled. There was a flurry of activity at the airport as a bunch of other people did the same – a young woman flying her grandfather’s lovely old shiny Cessna 172, and a young man working on building his flying time in a Cessna 152, who’d flown out to Tucson and was heading back to Chino (where I’d done a touch-and-go landing on Thursday). Another plane came in, did a few circuits without landing, and presumably didn’t like the wind and headed off again.

Everybody vanished as quickly as they’d come, and there we were at this empty airfield, baffled by the fact that we’d crossed into Mountain Time yet hadn’t lost an hour – till I remembered, after a random discussion nearly a year ago, that Arizona is the only state in the continental US to have abandoned daylights savings time!

There was ONE plane at Gila Bend Municipal Airport that we could see, a Cessna 150 with no wings. The hangar contained only a single antique fire engine. There was an airport office, open, with a sofa, a fridge, a microwave, and a bathroom; the office was inhabited by one spider and no humans. We unloaded all our luggage, made a reservation at the Gila Bend Space Age Best Western, and discovered that we had no transport into town. No Uber, no Lyft, no taxi, no one around to give us a ride – the hotel manager was away for the weekend, or she’d have done it. We thought about walking, but it was over two miles along a state highway full of trucks, and no footpath.

Tumbleweed Aviation

So after three hours, we made another plan, and decided to fly into Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. It wasn’t very far away, and it was the only place with a runway more or less INTO the stiff wind that was now blowing.

We’d already flown for two-and-a-half hours that day, but this last half-an-hour flight was probably some of the most challenging flying that Tim (or I) have ever done in terms of flight management – certainly the biggest airport I have ever turned up in via a single-engine plane! We came in at full power and top speed to avoid slowing down the poor guy behind us (“I can’t do less than 120,” we heard him say, and ATC responded, “Don’t worry, they’re not hanging around”). Tim landed and announced to me, “THIS is why I got my pilot’s license.”

We parked at one of the jet centers where we so definitely qualify as riffraff that it is kind of funny. The Rolls limo collecting passengers from the private jet next to ours no doubt cost thirty times what our plane is worth. I felt VERY CLASSY in my understated navy Lands’ End tank top! And Tim had mocked me for bringing my ACS Aviation, Perth, high-visibility vest with me on this trip, because certainly at Gila Bend, nobody gave a damn. But I was pleased to wear it to cross from our plane to the jet center at Sky Harbor, so NER.

We spent the night in downtown Phoenix and went to their Cinco de Mayo festival and danced to the sound of Big Mountain playing live, and drank fresh sugar cane juice and ate shrimp tacos for supper.

Honestly fabulous.

One Bravo Juliet jet-setting with the big boys at Sky Harbor

How I would love to tell you that we landed in Gila Bend, Arizona, yesterday afternoon, and drank margaritas at their Cinco de Mayo Festival!

But I would be making it up because we never got off the ground yesterday. We waited until 2 p.m. for the mist to burn off. Then when we were pre-flighting the plane, we discovered a disconnected Something. The poor engineer, who was on his way out to Nevada for the weekend, was called back. He decided to put in new spark plugs and refresh the ignition system as well. We made a plan B, then a plan C, and then, at 8 p.m. with night having descended, we went to plan D and returned to the Corona Best Western for a meal of beef jerky and potato chips.

Today was mostly unflyable anyway, but the work on One Bravo Juliet was still going on, so we sloped back to the airfield at about 10.00 a.m. We spent two hours on a wild goose chase trying to get a spare key cut for the plane; ate some ice cream, drank some coffee, hung out a bit more. There was one issue the engineer wasn’t satisfied with – turned out he’d received a faulty NEW part, which finally got replaced at around 4 p.m., and we took Julie for a check flight. (Let’s face it, she’s obviously Julie.)

And she is fine.

Tomorrow is supposed to be fine, too, so that is our revised departure!

The Corona, CA, Best Western from the Corona Municipal Airport downwind leg. I swam in that pool!

Space-age refueling station at Corona Municipal Airport - finally ready for departure.

That’s Corona Municipal Airport, an hour outside Los Angeles, where we’re starting from. Yesterday I had my
first flight in One Bravo Juliet, with Eric Cordova as my instructor – joining the circuit and landing at Riverside, then Chino, and finally back to Corona. It was incredibly good practice for me to get familiar with various American flying conventions – the 45-degree downwind join (sorry, technical details :-P , it happens), the fast and complex radio calls, the very cool flight app that everyone uses (which is only available on Apple products and forced Tim to suck it up and buy an iPad). Everyone I met at Corona was AGOG at the UK’s practice of making you do all your student navigation exercises using dead reckoning and a mechanical flight computer. “Oh yes, I saw one of those once,” was the general reaction. “You have to use that on your FLIGHT TEST???”

One Bravo Juliet getting a small makeover

Despite Tim having flown this plane to Big Bear yesterday, it was ME who spotted, on the initial start-up checks, that the electric fuel pump didn’t work. This postponed my own flight for an hour while Eric drove around the corner to the most amazing aviation supply shop I have ever seen, Aircraft Spruce and Specialty, to buy a new fuel pump, and the mechanics installed it.

***I WAS PROUD***

With flight instructor Eric Cordova after an hour of landings at other airfields!

Corona Municipal Airport may have been around for as long as a hundred years – it was a training center for the Army Air Corps during World War II, though it’s now completely civilian. They ran flight tests for the Mustang here! It still shows the bones of its wartime buildings, but it’s a vibrant recreational airfield now, with training and private pilots sharing the sky. The Corona Airport Café gives out toy airplanes to small people ordering from the kids’ menu.

Currently we are waiting for the mist to burn off so we can head to Phoenix.

I write this sitting in a Best Western Courtyard in Corona, California. Tomorrow begins my biggest flight adventure ever, though it takes some topping (“Flying across Kenya,” “Niagara Falls from the gun turret of a Lancaster bomber,” “A barrel roll in a Spitfire over Ben Lomond,” and “Wingwalking atop a Boeing Stearman bi-plane,” to name a few – but to be fair I was not at the controls for any of those experiences).

Well, after thirty years of talking about it, Tim and I are going to have a go at flying across America in a small plane. We start tomorrow.

The plane is PA-28 N991BJ (if you want to try to look us up on Flight Following), or Bravo Juliet for short, which is A GREAT NAME FOR A PLANE. It is a PA-28/Piper Warrior which is what I just renewed both my CAA (UK) and FAA (USA) licenses in last week. I can’t believe that flight test was JUST LAST WEEK – they already managed to send my new license!

Tim arrived here in California two days ago and did a training flight to Big Bear Airport very high in the mountains (because Scottish mountains are dinky and California mountains are ginormous), and I arrived yesterday and am doing a local training flight today because I have not done as much flying in the USA as Tim has.

Then tomorrow we set out, flying as far south of the mountains as we can go without busting the Mexico border. We have rented the plane for three weeks. We’re going to see how far east we can get, and then turn around and come back. Our stops are not planned in advance as they are weather-dependent, but we’re routing via Arizona and Texas towards Charleston, South Carolina.

As Stella North says in Stateless, “Oh, the astonishing freedom of wild geese!”

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(Full disclosure: This adventure is brought to you by a Roz Chast cartoon captioned “Middle Age – the clouds before the storm” and featuring a lady thinking, “I bet if I really wanted to I could bicycle across Canada”; and by Christian Miller, who actually did bicycle from Virginia to Oregon at the age of 59. She chronicled that trip in a book called Daisy, Daisy, which includes very good advice for how to plan a low-weight wardrobe. I am mindful also of the possibility of having to spend “a frozen night in the back of a Fox Moth,” as Maddie once said.)