Travel Tuesday

Five a.m. is when the alarm went off.  I haven't been getting up early, haven't had to, so that was a little bit of a shock.  Today we were going to Parkersburg, West Virginia.  Funny thing about that.  Originally I thought Dustin's email said we we were going to KPKB, which is WV.  I was good with that--it's warmer down there, right?  Then I looked at the email later, and it said KPKD, which is the northern tip of Minnesota.  That's not so good.  That's up by Canada, man.  Later still I looked one more time at the email, to see that he'd written one PKB in the subject and PKD in the body of the email, so I wasn't the only one confused.  I shot him a message and asked him which it was, if I needed Long Johns or not.  The answer was not.  West Virginia, it was.

The stars were still out bright when we left, and the sun wasn't even up over the horizon yet by the time we landed in WV.  That's just wrong.  But it was pretty.  It was a quiet flight.  Warm.  It was like a Spring day down there in West Virginia, and it was nice.  Coming in to land, there was fog off one end of the runway, and the rest of the area was clear.  Fortunately the end we needed to land on was the clear end.  ;)  I was too busy to take a picture though, unfortunately.

I had lunch at a restaurant right there on the field.  They do home grown food, and I had potato soup and grilled cheese.  Good stuff.

While I was there, a mom came in wearing a shirt that says "The Best Moms Raise Pilots", and her 16 year old son who is taking flight lessons there.  After the boy left with his instructor to go fly, the Mom started talking to me.  Asked if I flew, and then was telling me how this was her only son and she usually has to take a "nerve pill" by the time he takes off, and she doesn't want him to fly and she's terrified of him flying, but she's letting him do it anyway, but he and his dad don't tell her the truth on things, like they told her the instructor would be with him on his "First Solo" but just wouldn't touch anything, and she found out that wasn't true, and...so forth.  So I spent about an hour trying to answer her questions and hopefully ease some of her fears about her son's flying.  Because he told her when he was 8 that he had to be a pilot, and that he wanted to fly for Fed Ex. He learned what plane he'd be doing his lessons in, and memorized most of the stuff about it, before his first lesson.  When he was 14.  He's known what he wants since he was a young child, and he's going after it.  I sort of wish I could follow up with him and them and see how he's doing.  I think it's pretty cool.

Kaylee was accepted into Indiana University Kokomo.  She joked that she's been accepted into 100% of the colleges she's applied to.  She is still looking to start in Oregon at the Discipleship Training School for six months, then on to college.  For now.  We have a lot of stuff to do and plan before she graduates.

Soon we hit "Turn the clocks back an hour" time.  It will then be dark around 5 pm.  I feel such awful desperation when this time of year comes around.  Like I have to strap in and hang on for a few months here. *sigh*

Photos:

The crack of dawn

The next two are a little bit of fog near the airport

I couldn't decide if I liked horizontal or vertical better.

We are at the airport, on the ground, before the sun was even up. Wrong.

There's the sun, finally, in Parkersburg, WV

A few of the airplanes on the ramp today.

The next four are of the 340 on the ramp in Ohio.  I didn't edit the photos. They are as is, no filter.  Amazing.