Interesting Day II

Sometimes it's a good interesting, like yesterday, and sometimes it's a not-as-good interesting.

The day started with a Cub flight out at Glenndale, which went fine. We were working on the pattern, and as the morning progressed, in the period of about an hour we could feel the humidity and heat start weighing in. Even with the Cub doors wide open it was hot! The student called it quits, and we had lunch out at Glenndale. That was a big ole meal of homemade deliciousness, with not a lot of turnout, so folks don't know what they missed, but I had a big plate. Which turns out to be a good thing, as it was the last thing I ate for 9 hours. :)

The weather had been looking fine for our trip to pick up Kaylee from camp, and for my business guys to get picked up over in St. Louis. So I'm sitting at home, and I pull up the radar on a whim, and there is a large mass of thunderstorms heading right for us, and it's not far off. I yell "Steve, we need to go...NOW!" We booked it out to the airport, and as we're getting close, it's obvious we're in a race against the storm. The plane was already ready to go, so we just needed to get in it, get off the ground, and head south, and we'd be in front of the weather, and make it to Kaylee's end of camp program, etc. at 5:30. But as we parked the car at the hangar and got ready to get out, we felt a wind blast so hard that it started rocking the Explorer--and I looked over and saw a bunch of dust and trees bent over across the street. The rain/storm wasn't there yet, but the winds had arrived, and they were nasty. We were hosed.

The storms had blown up out of nowhere, weren't forecasted in 4 TAFs, weren't on radar last time I looked, and caught a whole bunch of us who needed to do things by surprise. Now we were going to have to wait for the storm to move through before we could get out, but the problem was, the storm was huge, went all the way back to Illinois, and all the way up to Michigan. I couldn't go around it to the north, couldn't sneak around it to the south, and it was too solid to pick your way in between cells. And it was moving the same direction we needed to go. By this point if we started driving to get to Kaylee's camp, we would be 3 hours late.

Next, as the storm picked up speed, it took out the power at the airport and quite a few surrounding areas as well. Now the hangar door was locked down, so even after the storm passed through, we wouldn't be able to get our airplanes out. I was really frustrated. If we'd have seen it blow up 20 minutes earlier, we could have gotten out. Shoulda woulda coulda. But I hated leaving Kaylee kind of stuck out there, without her parents there for their end-of-camp program thing, to be the last kid left there waiting on a parent, for hours. Steve called the camp so they could let her know what was going on, which is much better than being surprised by it, and then we just had to sit there and watch it rain. We weren't real confident on the power company's guess of having power up by 6 p.m., so at some point Steve got in the Explorer and start the 4.5 hour drive over, while I stayed behind in case I could get the plane out in time for me to beat him over there (it was like a 45 minute flight).

The airport guy came up with a really large generator and the guys had a plan. It was a huge thing, and the thought was to be able to fire it up and raise the big hangar door with it. Of course nothing goes that easily. Couldn't find the right cord to attach to the hangar, so Jon & Nathan cut apart another cord and rigged it up to work. Then the battery on the generator was dead as a doornail, so they had to hook up the jumper cables to a car and charge it up enough to start it. Finally, eventually it all came together, the door was opened, and the weather was good enough for the Cheyenne to take off and head west. I had called Steve back, so he was on his way back to fly over with me, and we just had to wait for the weather to move through Ohio. Another call to the camp, we'd be there 3.5 hours late, but we'd be there...

When we arrived, Kaylee was hanging out with a counselor. She was a little quiet at first, but pretty soon the camp stories started up. At this point, I had been starving for a few hours, so we found this restaurant in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, on the backroads, no real town even close by, and it was called something "Cabin". We figured it would just be a burgers and fries kind of place, there had been no real fast food places close by out there, so we stopped. When we walked in, we were met with cloth napkins, extra forks, two sets of glasses, you know, fancy. ;) Their meals featured seafood, lobster, scallops, fillet, I mean, good stuff. I had "ginger scallops with such and such rice and wasabi sauce drizzled on the whatever", and let me tell you what, they were delicious. Just not what you'd expect in the middle of nowhere. Kaylee just had a drink and blackberry sorbet, as she wasn't as starving as we were. :)

After the unexpected dinner delight, we made our way back to the airplane, where Kaylee and Steve rode in the back of the 340 together, talking a little, listening to music, and hanging out, while I flew us home. At one point there was a fireworks display going on in a town we were coming up on, which I watched for several miles. Kaylee came up and watched a few of the fireworks too before going back and halfway going to sleep, but she did not feel well. Her nose was like a faucet, her head hurt, her throat hurt, and she was just not herself.

We made it back home at midnight. That was a long, tiring day. Unfortunately we'd also had a surprise for Kaylee, and this was not the time nor way we wanted to spring it on her. She was crying at the door waiting to get inside, she felt lousy, didn't even want to say hi to her cats, it's midnight, and now we were going to try to do a fun surprise for her. *sigh* We walked her to her room, Steve walked in first, having told her we'd cleaned her fishtank out and it was our surprise for her; she walked in next, and then didn't even really stop, just walked right over to Steve and started bawling, hard. At first I wasn't sure whether or not this was a good thing. We'd rearranged and repainted her room, and I wasn't sure if she was upset at not picking out the colors herself as planned, if she liked it at all, or what. Turns out she was so surprised and happy (and probably tired) that it overwhelmed her. She loves it. Whew. :)

And that was one lonnnng day!