Satisfied

I woke up at 5 something a.m. checked the weather at 6, and told a guy who was driving up here to help us do T-6 rides to come on up.  I laid back down and didn't look again until 8 a.m., and by then there were some light rain showers, but no big deal.  I took a shower and got ready, looked at the radar, and Bam, it had blown up.  Not storms, but good-sized rain and scud.  Steve, Kaylee and AE had driven to Logansport to set up the tent and get things ready for rides, Zak had driven from an hour and a half away, and I got out to the airport and it was just too rainy.  Any other airplane might not have been too big of a deal, but the T-6 in the rain isn't good due to possible avionics damage, and we couldn't load rides with a top-open canopy airplane in the rain anyway.  So we waited.  And waited.  Finally the Logansport crew gave up and drove back to the Kokomo Airport, and I gave up and stayed there and waited for them.

The rest of the day was pretty nice though!  We stayed out at the airport until pretty late, almost 7 pm I think.  When the weather finally cleared off, I took Zak up in the T-6 and let him do it from taxi to take off to flying around to two landings, from the back, the same place me, Steve, and Ty all did our first takeoffs and landings in the plane.  It's good for you.  ;)  He had enough cushions back there that he could see pretty well, though, and ended up making some pretty good landings out of it.

Later in the evening Nathan gave the kids rides in the T-6 before we put it away.  Gwenie went first, then Andrew, and Kaylee wanted to go too.  She told me she wanted to do a barrel roll.  I explained to her that she'd just done aileron rolls before, and what the difference was a little bit, and she said she wanted to do them, so I told her to ask Nathan when they got up there.  I figured he wouldn't mind.  ;)  She said they did loops, wingovers, aileron rolls and barrel rolls, several of them, going from one move to another a couple times, and she said she really liked it.  I asked her what her favorite maneuver was, an she promptly said "All of them."  Then she said "Well, the loops were pretty cool.  Well, actually the barrel rolls were...okay, all of them."  She said she wanted to say "Wheeeee!" in the middle of it but didn't want to distract him while he was flying.  I laughed and told her she wasn't going to cause him a problem by saying "Whee", and that when we're sitting up front, we like to have the feedback from the backseaters while we are doing stuff like that so we know they are 1) okay and 2) enjoying themselves.  Nathan said the thing he didn't want to hear from the back seat was "gag, cough, URP".  Fortunately she felt fine.  She said that in one loop her vision started graying out.  We hadn't talked to her about how to manage g-forces yet, but she said that her muscles in her legs/rear were clenched after some of the moves, and we laughed and said that was right, and about half the battle.  :D  Anyway, I'm glad she got to go and do all the fun stuff, and I'm really glad she liked it so much.  She got to do something not a lot of people get to do--a series of nice, fun aerobatics in a T-6 with a pro.  :)

Tonight we're packing for Kaylee's camp--tomorrow we fly over to Ohio weather permitting and drop her off for a week's worth of camp.  She's excited...