The Arrival

Not much of anything about today went as planned, but that's life sometimes.  We hadn't heard back by bedtime last night--after 2 a.m.--what the plan was for today.  So we made up our own plan, by which Steve and Kaylee left the house at 7:30 a.m. and headed to Oshkosh by car with Nathan and Steve T.  Meanwhile I stayed and made phone calls and dealt with a bunch of problems in a row.  There was enough going on that if I tried to write it all out, I wouldn't even know where to start to make it flow.  It was...annoying.  Frustrating.  Finally I got the call that the 340 was put back together and ready for me to pick up.  I'm watching the weather, and it's iffy for a VFR flight.  My pilot taking me over isn't IFR current, which is fine for me getting there, since I'm with him, but not so fine for him going home on his own.  We watch the rain, watch the ceilings, and after a line moves through, we launched.  Got a little bit of rain, a few clouds, but nothing serious.  When we landed in Aurora, we stopped and checked the weather, and I ended up spending several hours sitting on the ground watching a line of storms move through the area in which I needed to go.  My chase pilot took off for home, and I just waited it out.  Here's part of the problem of the day.  The Oshkosh NOTAM said you had to have a specific time slot in order to be able to land at Fond du Lac (or the others).   In order to get a time slot, you have to pick the time you are going to land, you have to make it to your destination within 15 minutes of your scheduled time slot, and you have to file that flight plan 6 hours in advance.  Six hours in advance I didn't even know when the plane was going to be done, let alone anything else.  But I made my best guess, and scheduled a time slot for 6 p.m. local time, just in case the weather didn't get nice enough to let me go in VFR.  If it's VFR, you can just show up.  But of course today it wasn't VFR.  So I waited, and waited, and waited, and did I mention waited?  I was watching that line of storms, watching everything roll through, watching my timing, and I thought, you know, I think I can hit this.  I left a little early so that I could have extra time for thunderstorm dodging, and I launched IFR into the system.  I did end up dodging several storms and at one point I was given vectors that aimed me right at a big ole hot pink cell on my nexrad, which I told them wasn't going to work for me.  They were very accommodating, I'll give them that.  Anyway, so all that said and done, you know what time I touched down at Fond du Lac?  6:01 p.m.  I NAILED it.  :D

Steve and Jim Z were there waiting for me to pick me up--I got everything set up there, and we came on back and had a really good dinner at a new to us restaurant up here.  Fratellos.  I had ahi tuna, we had calamari, and bam bam shrimp...yum.  Came home and had cake and ice cream for Chuck's birthday.  :)

Our camper this year is tiny.  It's supposed to sleep three, but one of them has to be a kid.  Kaylee made us laugh when she told Steve "Three people may be able to sleep in here, but they won't all be able to stand up at the same time!"  It's fine though--we just sleep in there for the most part, don't need a ton of space.

It's very quiet here.  There are already a lot of trailers set up, but people are quiet.  The moon was rising up over behind us, the stars are out, and it's chilly out, which actually feels kind of good.  We're sitting around the fire, having a good time, but everybody got about 2-3 hours of sleep last night, including me.  Hopefully we all sleep like logs tonight...