Re: Returnign home from Gaston's thread.
BTW, I echo everything said about the departure today. I was glad I had my passengers go to Mountain Home. And the $3.85 fuel at Houston, MO was definitely worth stopping for.
+1 to both... I managed to squeeze in 57.1 gallons at $3.85 which will mean a significant savings for the trip.
I probably had the least "interesting" departure - I sent Kate and the bags to BPK with Mike, so I departed with about 50 gallons of air in the fuel tanks and just me, and I started my roll with max power and brake release from the driveway. So, I got the mains airborne pretty close to where the tents were and got up, up, and away from the squirrelly winds on the departure end.
We bumped along at 3500 to M48, loaded up on cheap fuel, and went up to the cool, smooth air at 9500 until east of the quad cities where I air-filed and dropped to 9000. We ended up in and out of the tops for a while, some beautiful puffy white sights - We saw Cloudhenge and a cloud formation that looked just like the natural arch out in Utah. The best part, after having groundspeeds drop to 65 knots on the trip down, was seeing the groundspeed get up to 178 in level flight and 190 in the initial descent.
Eventually, I got 5,000 from RFD approach which had us bumping along in the humid air below the clouds. It was a valiant race, but the thunderstorms won. N271G is safely on the ground at JVL... Now to figure out a retrieval.
OBTW, the Janesville Jet Center is
AWESOME. Some of the best service I've ever gotten, very nicely renovated facility (inside at least!)... And they just got a new load of fuel that they're selling for $4.70/gal which is about 80 cents cheaper than most full-service FBO's in the area. Well worth a stop!
The Garmin 496 is worth its weight in gold! We were able to avoid all the bad stuff; the worst we got was light rain and chop. Brief moderate at worst.
A-freakin'-men to that! I never would have made it without the 496.
Well, the Van Galder bus is arriving in MSN, so I'm off!