Another 5:30 am alarm. This time I had more trouble dragging my butt out of bed than I had so far. I can do all days, I can do early days, I can do late nights, but more than two in a row and I need a break. But I didn't have time for a break yet.
Down in the lobby of the hotel, we met at 6:15 am for "breakfast" (I can't eat at 6 am), and a meeting for the day. It was raining. We left at 6:45 to head to the airport, and it rained all morning anyway, so we all stood down and watched it rain. Like I said, I needed to do rides to make some money on my part of the stop, but...nothing I can do about turn-out OR the weather. That's one of the things I really dislike about doing this.
The one good thing that came of it, though, was that I got to sit and just talk with "Lumpy" and "Doc", which now that I type them out together sounds like a couple of the 7 Dwarves, but is really two of the Gunfighter pilots. It was raining, and we just sat together and talked about T-6 training, about the airshow life, about Oshkosh, about all of it, for a couple of hours. It was good conversation, relatively deep, not just small talk, and I enjoyed it. When it quit raining, I saw a few people go out by BOB, and I hopped up and said "Time to go tell folks about BOB!" and left them there to go do my job, which is also usually pretty appreciated.
I ended up only getting two rides in on Friday, because of the rain, and then I had to leave at 3 pm to catch my airline flight home. One of those rides was an annoying older gentleman who kept telling me all about his flying prowess, his 2500 hours, everything he'd flown, story after story. He bought the copilot seat. Then two ladies bought two back seats, so off we went. At the end, I made him grumpy because he would ask me things like "Aren't you going to check that the flaps work before takeoff" and I ignored him. When the engine didn't start right away he said "Did you flood it?" and I ignored him. I'd only answer questions that were real questions, not questions that were designed to prove he knew more about flying than I did. When we landed, we were taxiing in, and he said something like "Well, that was survivable" or something stupid like that, and I laughed and said "Well, I'd hope so!" He then just said "Well, BYE", really aggressively, and walked off after we landed. He didn't like it that the ladies were asking me a bunch of questions and we were talking about the WASP. So all in all I pissed off one guy. He'd also flown the T-6 with Savannah the week before, so he sent the CAF something with pictures of him with her and talked about how wonderful that flight was, and then he mentioned he rode in the C-45 and how different the controls felt and that was about it. I was not wonderful for him. I did not care. ;)
One of my previous flights is the one you saw I posted on social media. He was in his 90s, I thought he said 95 but I was told that would have made him too young, so I probably misunderstood. But he was a B-24 pilot during WWII. I know the CAF guys took a video and got his story on "tape". So I got to fly him, his wife and his daughter. I'm not supposed to let other people fly the airplane, but not only do I let them anyway, but this time I publicly said I did it and posted a photo of him on the internet, where it has gotten in total over the three places I posted it, over 600 likes, comments, 20 shares, etc. So I'm "outed" as far as doing something "illegal" in the CAF, but I do not care. When I said he had the controls, he just shifted his body and put his feet up and hands up and took over like it was yesterday, not decades since he'd last flown. It was ingrained. I hope I can do that when I'm 95 if I'm still alive at that point.
WE had a lovely flight.
My last flight for today was a full flight, I had five people, which I needed, again to pay for my expenses of being there. We were taking off at my last possible minute to be done and out of there on time, but it was a good flight, and I got $800 on that ride, which helped.
It was time to book it for my airline flight. I was now running late, so I didn't take time to change my clothes. I'm in a flight suit, not wearing clothes underneath, racing to Albany International, to park a car at Million Aire so Glenn can pick it up when he airline flights in later, having them run me over to the terminal so I can get to my gate and be ready to fly. I try to change clothes in the car but a flight suit is not conducive to removing while driving. I made it, however.
When I got to Million Aire, I changed clothes, and it was such a relief. No more flight suit, no more sweaty.
Driving down the road to Albany, I thought the same thing I thought driving to the airline airport in Huntsville. I'm now driving on all the things I flew over for days, that I'd only seen from the air, and now I see from the ground. Most of the time that's backwards. You see things on the ground for ages and then see them from the air. The hills looked bigger from down here, the Mohawk River I followed on all my rides was neat, the huge reservoir I flew over, all of it was weird, seeing it from another perspective. I enjoyed it. It made me a little philosophical feeling.
I talk about not wanting to feel "sameness" or in a rut, and here I get to have these experiences. I'm at my house, then I'm in Michigan, Ohio, Indy, Philly, Albany, Schenectady. I'm flying a 340, riding on an airline, flying a C-45. I'm in a rental car driving along the backwoods hills of rural NY, looking at the sites, and enjoying a local bite to eat. I'm in another airline, layover in Washington DC, and I see the Pentagon and the Monument there. I'm coming home to fly a T-6 at an event, before I have more normal trips coming up again. These are things that I think some day sitting in a rocking chair, nobody else will give a shit about, but I do. I am glad to have had the experiences, to meet some of the people I have, to have gotten to do the things. Even if nothing new is coming, which I doubt, because I'm still only 52 ya know, but even if this was the end of the run, it was a heck of a good run. And I have a family who loves and supports me on TOP of being able to do flying experiences I enjoy, and didn't have to choose. I am a fortunate person, is all I'm saying. Life hasn't been perfect, or always very kind, and there are still plenty of problems we're looking at right now that I just don't get into publicly here, including lawsuit stuff, but...I don't have many regrets, and I think that says something.
Anyway. Like I said, landed in Washington DC for my connecting flight to Indy. A mom and her kid took my window seat, and I let her. She asked if I minded because they didn't sit her and her kid together, and he was LITTLE, he was like 2 or 3, barely talking. So while I'm normally on the "if you want that seat you should have paid for it", I did not pay for it either, so I let her have it and I sat on the aisle across from them. And he did good, looking out the window, asking a ton of questions, etc. We were also in the LAST row of the airplane. I don't know if I've ever sat in the very last seat against the rear bulkhead before. I'm not a fan. Big tube full of people and I'm the last person off. But...it wasn't that long of a flight thankfully.
Landed back at Indy around 10:30 pm. Walked out to the garage, got my car, drove back to Kokomo, got there almost midnight, and I was Done. Exhausted. I didn't unpack. I didn't do anything except wash my face and collapse into bed. Why? Because... (next day)
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