Wild Blue Yonder

The weather over the weekend started out good and then turned not so good unexpectedly, but it was good enough on Friday to allow me to fly myself up to Redding for the Official Visit. Flying is an important part of my ability to travel because I just can't sit in one spot for long enough to get to some of our events. There was a time, when I was younger and had better joints when I could climb into my car in Riverside and drive to San Jose without stopping, usually taking about five to five and a half hours to do it. But no more! Those days are long gone. Now, my car limit is about three to four hours. After that, I can't get up out of the seat. I am sure that seeing me folded into a permanent pretzel is probably pretty funny for the audience, less so for me. It falls into what some of my male friends call football in the crotch humor. They tell me that watching a football hit another guy right in the crotch and watching him fall over moaning is pretty funny ( the guys said - you wince while you laugh, but you still laugh) right up to the point where you are the guy. Some people can get out of the car for an hour or so and then get back in and get going, but that doesn't work for me. If we stop for a meal, that is more sitting and then another car stretch, pure agony. It's not like at work, where I can get up every hour or so and walk around. That I can do. But hours and hours in the car, OW! So when we go south of Santa Maria on the coast or Bakersfield inland or north past about Oroville, I prefer to fly. Now going south is easy. I can fly from San Jose to Burbank or Ontario or Santa Ana or San Diego and there's lots of flights and cheap prices. But going north can be very tough because there just isn't any good deals to do it unless you are going all the way to Portland, Oregon. Luckily for me, I have a touch of a wild card, a pilot's license and a great flight club. So this weekend, I was able to go from San Jose to Redding in my plane. It was only two hours to get there, but almost two and a half coming back because of the wind. You see, flying is one activity where it really can be uphill (or downhill) both ways. I had a great tailwind flying up the state, which boosted me along wonderfully, just like riding a bike down a really tall mountain, but a headwind coming back home, which is the uphill part. It is also more expensive to fly "uphill", because for an airplane, you don't measure the gas by the distance you can travel on a gallon the way you do in a car, you measure how many gallons an hour it takes to run the engine, so more hours equals more gallons. However, when you look at what it costs to fly to Redding or Eureka or any of those smaller northern airports, flying your own plane is very, very cost effective. While driving used to be far cheaper, as the price of gas climbs, the difference becomes less. So the plus side of flying yourself is that there are little airports everywhere and you can't be late because the plane won't take off without you. You also don't have to take off your shoes or unpack your laptop to get in the plane. Also, if you call ahead, the place where you park your plane can also arrange your rental car and they will bring it to you so you can just load your luggage and drive off. It is awesome! The down side of flying yourself is that you become very weather dependent and the weather is not often very predictable. I had to cut my trip north a bit short because unexpected thunderstorms were coming into northern California and a retired Navy flier friend of mine told me that there is no excuse for flying into a thunderstorm in peacetime. But usually in California in the summer, you can fly around pretty easily, unlike the other side of the Rockies, where it rains every day and twice on Sunday. Tornados and thunderstorms and hail, yuck! No wanna fly, no wanna fly! Next week, I will be in Santa Maria and Ventura. I will not be in Orland, Visalia or Tulare.