Knoxville

Nathan, Tre, Holly, Jamie & Gwenie, me and Quentin loaded up in the Cheyenne today and headed for Knoxville, Tennessee, wheels up at 7:30 a.m.  As we were cruising along, climbing up, center came on and said "Moderate to severe turbulence, all altitudes.  It doesn't matter where you go.  It's all terrible. There are no good rides."  The SIGMET for turbulence covered everything from Green Bay Wisconsin to Cleveland Ohio and down to us in Tennessee.  I don't think I've ever heard that before.  We got lucky, and stayed low, and 20,000' is about as low as anybody has ever flown a trip in that airplane, but we ended up with light to moderate turbulence at least.  And a little ice.  And a lot of rain.  So I pulled up the weather for our destination, and it was calling for clouds 100' and visibilities of 1/2 mile.  The problem is, the ILS for that airport has minimums of 200' and 3/4 mile.  I looked around for an alternate, and there wasn't a great option close enough to get us to a funeral on time.  When we got there, they asked if we wanted to hold and wait for better weather, or give it a try.  We are Part 91, which means we can give it a try even if it's reporting below minimums, so we did.  Nathan was flying, so I called out altitudes, lights in sight, runway in sight, etc.  It is handy to have two people sometimes when it's super low.  But the interesting part was that right about at 200', I had the lights in sight, so we could come down another 100'.  By the time we got a little lower, we broke out, and the visibility was good, and we came in for a nice easy landing.  But about 1/3 of the way down the runway was a wall of clouds.  The fog was over the other half of the runway and the whole rest of the airport.  The only decent area was right at the landing zone for the runway we came in on.  ATIS had to be on the bad part of the runway, and tower couldn't see us, so we had to report when we cleared the runway and cleared the taxiway.  It was so murky--well, basically we taxiied into a cloud, literally, so...

We were there because Tre's sister had passed away, and it was her memorial service and luncheon.  I didn't know her personally, but she sounded like a pretty great, fun lady.

The trip home was less adventurous.  The weather was better, we were all sleepy from eating and being up early, and the winds were in our favor, doing 440 mph for awhile there.  The trip home only took an hour. 

I came home and tried to nap for a little while, because I was super sleepy.  But I couldn't get a good nap in, so I just got up, changed clothes, and Steve and I went to our airport Christmas Party at the Wild's house.  Turn-out was pretty good, I think most folks enjoyed themselves, and we got around to most people. 

Now it's 11:30 pm and I'm wiped out.  It's Laura's bed time...

Kaylee is at an overnight church function, after a dinner, after a Pep Band event at her school.  She's a busy girl...

Breaking out on top

Cloud action

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