I was up at 6 am, left at 7 to head to Frankfort, got there at 7:45, wheels up at 8, headed to Sparta, Kentucky with Nick. Sparta is a brand new airport, just has a runway and a ramp. No approaches, so it had to be VFR. It's still not in the GPS, so the airplane screams at you all the way down final, on the landing, on the takeoff. "TERRAIN PULL UP PULL UP PULL UP!" Loudly. No fuel (didn't need it), no buildings, no bathrooms, no car, no people, no nothing. Since we were going to be there for at least two hours, but I couldn't go with them because they had to be listed and badged to enter. But there was nowhere for me to go except sit in the airplane on the ramp for a few hours, so once their ground guy there found the airport (which also didn't have a real road going to it yet), he picked us up and took me to the truck stop nearby. It had a McDonald's attached to it. So I ordered breakfast and coffee and sat there and people watched. I hung out on my phone, moved tables, walked around the truck stop, listened to the showers become available for the truckers, looked at all the truck stop goodies, went back to the McDonald's with me tea so nobody would kick me out. I have hung out at worse places in this flying career. ;) I was fed, hydrated, warm, and had wifi and people around but that I could ignore, so hey...
We left there and I headed to Delphi, IN to drop Nick off and pick up Stephen. Stephen and I then flew to, of all places, Sparta, Michigan. What are the odds of two guys working on different projects in different states needing to go to a tiny town both named "Sparta" on the same day? Slim!
I dropped Stephen off in Sparta, and then I took right back off and ran to Kalamazoo. I was sitting in the pilot's lounge there, and there's an office right off of it, and whoever was in there was listening to rap, Eminem, all sorts of rap crap, dropping f-bombs, that you couldn't not hear from the lounge. I eventually left the lounge, took a courtesy car into town, and went to a Fireside restaurant, with huge windows facing a nice river, tree, nature scene, and had a salmon BLT sandwich that was Really good. Got back, added the 100 gallons of fuel to the airplane to avoid their $110 fee, which is a lot on both ends, for the record, and then Stephen was back. So we hopped in the plane and flew back to Frankfort, and that was the end of the day, around 4:30 pm.
The FBO guy gave me a tutorial on how to operate the airplane tug so I could put my own plane in and out if I needed to instead of calling them at 11 pm or whatever sometimes. It's nice to have them do it, but I always feel really guilty, because someone has to come back out after closing and do it for me. I can operate my own tugs everywhere but there. So now hopefully I can do it there, too.
I came home, turned off my phone, crawled in bed and napped for an hour. I was SO tired. I'd slept like crap the night before.
Yesterday went as planned, went to Ohio, picked up Fortner and his apprentice, flew them to somewhere else in Ohio where Don the Former Florida Conquest mechanic now lives, and he looked over the oil leak on the left engine. With some tests he determined 100% that it's a compression seal, that it only leaks oil when the plane is at full power, and that there is almost no chance of some catastrophic failure, it'll just be messy until we get it fixed. So that was encouraging.
The other thing is that Ethan said it was okay to use a service to do all the Cayman paperwork for us. Permits, Payments, Handlers, overflight stuff, Cayman stuff, customs stuff. So I sent them all that info yesterday too, and supposedly they are going to take care of everything for me. Once we have that paperwork and can see how it was done, then I'm hoping to be able to do it myself from there on out and not have to have someone pay a bunch of money because of my lack of experience internationally. I feel better having someone else working on it for me, and yet I am also still nervous about what I need to do, what might go wrong, what THEY might goof up, the Cuba overflight, all of it. My first trip is Friday so...here goes nothing.
Pics of the Conquest on the ramp
Misty hills going into Sparta, KY
Ohio river by Sparta, KY
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