Our Annual Ski Vacation

Our ski vacation this year took us to Breckenridge. And actually it was designed partly around the fact that Mark was DYING to go back to the vertical wind tunnel (to relive the skydiving years). So we went with a few of our old skydiving buddies to ski and to play in the tunnel. Here we all are outside of one of the ski resorts. (Mark, Angela, Paul, Greg)

Then of course, here we are playing in the snow!

Mark with his requisite thumbs up....

A couple of awesome scenery pics...

I just thought the icicles on the underside of the snow falling off the house just looked really cool.

Then a few sunset pictures from the drive home....most excellent. Sun sets behind the mountain with awesome cloud cover as a backdrop.

I just liked this picture of us and thought I'd share.

Here's us just hanging out at the end of the day. Mark sharing pictures on the computer and me, I decided that since we were skiing I wanted to knit a ski hat :D

And here is the fruit of my knitting....Now to end with, a picture of us with the awesome mountains in the background...how awesome!

Flying Out for Dinner

We had fun last night, I got some good flight experience, and I wanted to share… I normally fly on Friday’s and 1) since Angela didn’t have a soccer game this Friday, 2) her Birthday is this weekend, and 3) she likes flying places, I thought flying her out for a nice dinner some place we had never been would be nice. So where’d we go?? Well, I found this little Bed & Breakfast called Carson House in Pittsburg, TX. They’re also open as a restaurant to the general public. How’d I find it? I usually pick an airport to fly to and then look for places to go around it. It happened to come up in the search. Turns out it was really nice!

Our destination airport was Mount Pleasant Regional. If you draw a line from Meacham airport (where we fly out of) to Mount Pleasant, it goes right over the top of DFW airport. This is considered “Class B” airspace, and requires a special clearance to enter. We could do it, but for the trip over I just decided to fly around it to the South.


The trip over to Mount Pleasant was as expected… We actually saw a ground speed of 145kts (167mph!) and the flight took us barely over an hour.

I had arranged earlier in the day to get one of the airport courtesy cars for the evening. I had talked to Butch at the airport a couple of times setting this up and he’s a super nice guy. The airport was basically closed for the evening but he arranged to have a car available for us (thanks Butch!)

We drove South from the airport, and eventually found the Carson House. We had a very nice dinner, the people were extremely nice, and Angela told me all about her experience with the kids at the Good News Club earlier in the day. As all good things normally do, dinner came to an end way to early. Angela & I headed back to the airport. We left some money for the gas we used, gave the plane a quick once over, and then loaded up for home.

After taking off we turned due West, this time planning on going around the Northern part of the ‘class B’ airspace at DFW. We new we’d be fighting a bit of a headwind so we settled in for a longer flight this time.

The plane we fly has some really fancy-dancy equipment in it that calculates the winds you’re flying in (quick lesson… the airplane flies a certain speed through the air. In our case ~135mph. If the wind is not blowing at all we would be moving over the ground at that exact same speed. If the wind is 10mph in the same direction the plane is flying, then the plane is moving across the ground at 145mph. If the wind is 10mph in the opposite direction, the plane is moving at only 125mph across the ground. Make sense…) Anyway, it became apparent the winds at altitude were a little stronger than originally forecasted. We saw the winds coming at us were 34kts (39mph)… ugh! We tried different altitudes, but it didn’t matter. And unfortunately 34kts would be the best we’d see for the remainder of the flight! The farther we went, the stronger the winds got.

The winds eventually peaked out at 53kts (61mph), yikes! There’s no way around it… the only way to get home is to keep going the direction we’re going, but we’re only moving across the ground at a “measly” 78mph. Heck, we could almost be driving that fast.

The controllers seemed to have a relatively light workload during our flight and actually cleared us to fly right through the middle of the class B airspace. He told us to fly right over the top of DFW airport at about 3,400ft. Once we FINALLY got there (seemed to take FOR-EV-ERrrrrrrrr) we were both checking out all the big jets parked at the terminal gates, and the enormous size of the runways. Angela & I have both flown into and out of that airport numerous times but never right over the top of it… in a Cessna! Sweeeeet… We had plenty of time to enjoy it too since we were going so SLOW!

Once back at Meacham the approach to landing was pretty bumpy, and we touched down almost an hour and 45 minutes after we took off… ugh! This is the first flight I actually felt the need to do some quick fuel calculations just in case. We had plenty of fuel when we took off, but you really don’t expect to have a 60mph headwind for the majority of the trip! Turns out we were more than fine, but I was definitely thinking about it.

So, all is well, we both had a wonderful time, and we both experienced some new things. Can’t beat that!