We're Not in Kansas Anymore!

We made it to Borger, Texas!  For those of you keeping score at home, we did two legs today:  Alliance, Nebraska to Great Bend, Kansas and then to Borger, Texas.  We had decent tailwinds enroute to Great Bend, and a little bit of crosswind action on the way to Borger.  Each leg was pretty uneventful.  The fly-bys are always a little hairy, but they weren't too bad.  We had to extend some downwinds, go-around, and do some 360s at each airport, but we never were in any danger of swapping paint with anyone.

After petting the fainting goats at the corn farm, we left for the airport in Alliance.  We departed about 1:30PMish to miss the mad rush of people screaming out of there at the noon release time.  It was still pretty busy when we left, but nothing too bad.  We were doing about 150 knots ground speed for awhile, but lost the bulk of that when we got closer to Great Bend.

We landed at Great Bend to get some snacks and fuel.  We were only there for a bit before departing for Borger.  We stayed low enroute to Borger, and man was it hot!  The outside air temperature gauge was reading about 100F for most of the route.  It's really dry too, so you don't really notice that you're baking until you're already cooked.  We were passed by a few aircraft, but they were faster aircraft than us (mostly Cessna 182s) so I wasn't upset.  We just chugged along until we got to Borger.

Enroute, I managed to embarrass myself yet again.  I was chugging water and on to my second water bottle.  I grabbed it and went to flip the little straw up, and did it a little bit too quickly.  Since the poor thing has been at every density altitude from Iowa City to here, guess what happened?  A geyser of water started to shoot out of the straw and up into the ceiling, only to rain back down all over me and my charts.  Thankfully, it missed all of the electronics and the important charts, so it wasn't a big deal.  It was drier than a bone too, so it disappeared pretty quickly (except for the stuff dripping from the sun visor into my lap for fifty miles).  Jo was laughing so hard, I thought we were going to have to divert to let her out to use the bathroom.  After about twenty miles of laughing at me, she finally settled down.

The fly-by runway at Borger was tough to spot.  They had a nice, black runway that stood out, but the fly-by runway was one of these dirty brown affairs.  It looked like a field from far away.  We finally managed to pick it out and did the fly-by with little difficulty.

The tentative plan for tomorrow is to make it to El Dorado, Arkansas.  That's pronounced El-doh-RAY-doh as Dan (my weather buddy) informs me.  As always, we'll see what the weather has in store for us. 

Time to go to bed.  I'm about seeing things at this point.  I don't even know what time zone I'm in anymore!