Landed in Mobile, Alabama

We are down safe and sound in Mobile, Alabama!  Today has been another long day, but we get to sleep in tomorrow!

We departed Borger, TX ahead of a good-sized thunderstorm.  It was almost comical how everyone and everything this morning seemed to be trying to keep us from getting ahead of this storm.  I wanted to capitalize on some low-level winds, and the sweet spot was about a 9:00AM departure.  Everything was conspiring against us: there was a screw-up with the shuttle to the airport; we had to wait for people; folks needed pictures; the camera jammed; traffic; and then the airplane was parked in a hole that we needed four people to get it out of.  All the while I'm watching this storm bearing down us.  We made it out though, but then the GPS decided to have a brain fart on takeoff so we had to troubleshoot that.  We sorted it out and were on our way.  We cleared the storm and had smooth sailing to Norman, OK.

Norman was an interesting fly-by.  The airport lies just south of two class C airports, so the airspace is busy.  I elected to not contact approach to save us the agony of getting vectored all over creation.  We contacted Norman tower, and it was game on.  That controller was awesome.  He was juggling a megaton of traffic doing low approaches, landings, and departures and managed to get us straight in with no delay.  When we came back to land, he had us flying about a 500' pattern and inside of a Cherokee.  It was a carrier landing, but we got it down.  He was a champ.

The volunteers at Oklahoma were awesome and gave us some cool souvenirs.  We checked the weather and decided to go for El Dorado, Arkansas.  We were in line for a long time waiting for departure, since Oklahoma State's fleet decided to all return at once.  Once we had some space, we did the departure and were on our way.

We landed at El Dorado, AR and had to decide if we wanted to push to Mobile or not.  Lots of teams were milling about and waiting to see what everyone else did.  I went somewhere quiet and talked with a weather briefer for about a half hour trying to make a decision.  There were bad storms over Mobile, and storms along the route along with precipitation, but the briefer and I both thought that if we just waited a bit, we could get in behind them.  Jo and I elected to wait for about two hours, and depart about 5:00PM to push for Mobile.

Time came, and we hopped in the plane and departed.  Some teams had departed ahead of us, and we learned this evening that quite a few had to divert or land at different airports due to crummy weather.  We had smooth sailing almost all the way to Mobile with tailwinds to boot.  We came across some cool cloud formations, and only ran into a teeny tiny bit of precip right before doing the fly-by at Mobile.  When we came in, the airport was dead.  Normally it's very busy with scheduled service as well as cargo and general aviation operations.  We landed with little fanfare and got the airplane parked.

Once we got the airplane parked, there were some kids from the Mobile Boys and Girls Club that came running out to greet us.  Jo and I showed them the plane, and I let them run around the ramp with my iPad to see the moving taxiway diagrams in action.  They got a big kick out of it.  We packed our stuff up with Jo's husband, and headed to the hotel.

I had to use a scraper to get the grime, dirt, sweat, oil, and fuel off of me, but I'm finally clean and ready for bed.  I am sleeping in until I can't stand it tomorrow.  We don't have any mandatory things to do until Friday (I think).