We are doing our planning for the day and selecting our routes and how far we want to go. I think we'll push for two legs today. I don't want to give away too many details, lest we have spies peeping on the blog . . .
Now that I'm more coherent, I can fill you in on the flight yesterday. We departed Iowa City, IA and filed to Great Island, NE (KGRI). I wanted to try and get out ahead of a line of convection that was predicted to fire up in the early afternoon. We elected to go south and risk having to wait out a few nasty bits of weather versus doing hard IFR through the north. Well, we had screaming headwinds enroute to KGRI and decided to divert to Omaha, Nebraska, which is a Class C airport for fuel. I wanted to divert there because if we had to wait, they generally have very nice facilities and amenities because small jets frequent there. Getting into the airport was interesting. We had been in varying light IFR and hard IFR enroute, and ran into a wall of hard IFR at the airport. We had to shoot the ILS into 14R to get in. The kicker was that we had to land with a gusting quartering tailwind. Not fun. But we made it down and grabbed the crew car to head into town to get lunch and wait out the really nasty stuff. We wanted to wait for the surface winds to die down at Alliance (gusting to 45) before we made a run at it. We had fun eating lunch and poking around downtown Omaha. We barely avoided a parking ticket, but my charms won out! (Right . . .)
After the weather wasn't so terrible, we left Omaha at about 6:00PM enroute to North Platte for another fuel stop. It was more IFR enroute. When we got to North Platte, things had cleared up and the winds were calmer. We had an uneventful stop and ate the free cookies in the FBO!
We did some night flying to Alliance. It was very, very pretty. There is nothing in between North Platte and Alliance. We are talking NOTHING. I played the ranch game while Jo rolled her eyes at me. When we got to Alliance, it was pitch black, since there are no city lights to help you. We had to do a black hole approach into the runway. That's always a little eerie. In hindsight, I probably should have stayed IFR and just done an ILS in versus having to think that hard at the end of a really long day. Imagine landing over the water at night, and that's what it looked like. I knew what to expect (thanks Brian!) and we made it in in one piece.
All of the hotels in town were booked up, so we got ourselves a room about 45 minutes from the airport on a corn farm. The drive over was beautiful. Stars as far as the eye can see. I was a little confused about the directions that the proprietor gave us, and we accidentally ended up giving the poor lady a lawn job at 10:30 at night. Very embarrassing. We apologized profusely and stumbled into our room and promptly went into a post-flight coma.
The goal is to get to Texas today, so hopefully my next update will be from there!
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