How much wood.....

We spent a couple more days at the Airventure show. The weather on Friday was great so they had the same airshow as on Tuesday. The sky was once again filled with planes. The highlight of the day was the concert Friday night by Gary Sinise & the Lt. Dan Band.

http://www.ltdanband.com/

You may have heard of Gary Sinise. He is a famous movie and TV actor. He was in Forrest Gump, as Lt. Dan. Also in Apollo 13 and CSI:NY and many others. Gary is not only a great actor but he is also a pretty good bass guitar player. In 2003 Gary started the band with Kimo Williams. Kimo is a veteran and a guitar player. The main focus of the band is to play for veterans so they play lots of USO shows. It's a big band with a couple guitars, two drummers, 4 singers and a keyboard player. They play music from Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Zac Brown band and many more. It was a good show.

One of Pete's favorite planes is a Swift and he tracked some down at the show. Here is one in very nice shape.

Another interesting machine is from a Massachusetts company, started by some MIT grads. They are building a flying car. It's not a new idea but they have a pretty nice one. Pete once did a thesis paper on flying cars.

There was a B-29 at the show Saturday. That's the type of bomber that dropped the atomic bombs in WWII.

This morning's weather was kind of cloudy with another front hanging around. We decided to go up and have a look. After getting a little bit west the clouds were building more so we landed at the Greater Wisconsin Regional airport (CWA) in Mosinee. The hotel we got is in Wausau right next to a ski hill.

The first question to the waitress during our late lunch was, 'is there a minor league baseball team around here?'. Turns out there isn't but there are the Woodchucks! The Woodchucks are in a summer college league, similar to the Cape Cod League. They had a home game tonight.

Well the Woodchucks were winning 3-0 going into the 9th inning when the Wisconsin Rapids Rafters scored 3 to tie it. The Woodchucks got the bases loaded in the 10th and drove in the winning run.

The players stay with local families for the season. The folks sitting behind us have 2 of the players staying with them. The woman was telling a story about the other morning as she was getting ready to head off to work at 6:15am and she heard the boys in the basement. She felt bad that she made too much noise and woke them up. As they came up stairs, all dressed and ready to go, one of them said to her "didn't you know it is take your player to work day?". The boys were heading off to help out at a baseball clinic for kids. She spoke very highly of the kid, he's a charmer she said.

Another front is supposed to hang around here for a couple days so we may or may not make much progress westward. Jolly, if you are reading this, we are heading your way.

More Oshkosh

The weather hasn't been as nice the past two days as it was on Tuesday. Yesterday morning it rained hard. We stopped to buy umbrellas before heading to the event but we still got pretty wet. It's a long walk from the parking area to the show area. The rain also turned the high traffic areas into mud.

Today's weather was better but still had low clouds. It didn't rain until the end of the day. We waited under a tent for some heavy rain to pass before getting back to the car.

With the low clouds, the afternoon airshows are much different. The planes can't do their full routines, going as high as needed. So there are lots of low level passes. They also make lots of passes over the runway, climb up about 500 feet, do a loop back down and do the same thing at the other end of the runway. The jump team did jump today. There were over 12 jumpers.

The highlight for today was hearing Bob Hoover speak. Bob was a fighter pilot in WWII, a test pilot, aerobatic champ and an airshow performer. Everyone who speaks of him says he is a great guy. Well he is also a great story teller. He told one story about going to Moscow with US Aerobatic team in the mid '60's. The US team wasn't that good and only finished 7th out of 17. The Russians won.

He told about how the CIA briefed him before going over there. They thought he might get offered a chance to fly a Russian plane, which he thought was crazy. Why would they let him fly one of their planes. During the 11 days of competition, Bob watched very closely how the winning Russian pilot flew his plane. Sure enough, after the awards were handed out, they asked him if he wanted to fly the winning plane. He had noticed that pilot didn't fly the plane inverted (up side down) very much.

He explained how the airport was near a river on the far side of the field and there was a 30 foot wall on that side of the field. Bob took off quickly, went a short distance and went inverted. He then flew over the wall and dropped down below it. It looked to the crowd like he was going to crash but he turned right side up and flew along the wall, out of sight. Just before coming back over the wall and into sight, he went inverted again. So he came back into sight at the other end of the field. He then did all the maneuvers the Russian pilot had done but he did them inverted.

The Russian crowd went crazy. The Russian officials were not so happy and arrested him. They said he broke laws by flying so low. They let him go the next morning and sent him home.

The Oshkosh airport is near a big lake and there is a seaplane base in a small cove off the lake. It's a nice setup with docks, moorings and some buildings. Here are some photos of that.

Oshkosh Day 1 (for us)

Let's just start with, WOW! That is a huge event. There are planes everywhere. Most are owned by people who flew them in for the event. Fields are filled with planes and their owners camping next to them. Manufactures also have planes on display. Military planes are there, new and old. Lots of old WWII planes. Companies selling aircraft parts and accessories are in 4 big hangers. Planes were flying all over the place and that was before the airshow.

The airshow was the highlight of the day. There is an airshow each afternoon for 2.5 hours. They are also celebrating 100 years of Naval aviation. So the beginning of the show had tons of WWII planes flying. I swear there must have been 60 aircraft in the sky at the same time. There were two big groups. One had 4 elements of 4, that's 16. The other had 5 elements of 4, that 20. So there were 36 planes just in those two groups. There were others circling around at a bunch of different altitudes, including helicopters.

36 planes in this picture!

Most planes that are in airshows have a lot of power to perform the aerobatics. One guy was flying an old tail dragger (did you look it up?) with only a 90 HP engine. His partner drove an RV down the runway. The RV had big platform on the top. The pilot LANDED on top of the moving RV and then the RV stopped! The driver then started down the runway again and the pilot took off. That was really cool. Sorry but we didn't get any good shots of that.

Oh, one more thing. Dan had some fun with Pete today. One of the first stops was at the Aircraft Owner's and Pilot's Association (AOPA) tent. They are having a daily give away so we signed up for that. They also were handing out stickers. If you had one on, the 'prize patrol' might see you out and about during the day and give you a prize. Dan put his sticker on the front of his shirt. Well, Pete didn't hear about the sticker thing, so Dan put it on Pete's back (without him knowing). He had it on all day. It would have been perfect if Pete won a prize today but he didn't.

Made it to Waupaca

We are now in Waupaca, WI (PCZ). Thunder storms kept rolling across our route all weekend so we sat in Kankakee. Chicago got 7 or so inches of rain over the weekend!

This morning we got to the airport at 7am even with it covered in fog. We hoped it would burn off by 9 but it was close to 11 before we got off. And even then there were a lot of clouds around the airport. We climbed out above them to 6,500 feet and then headed Northwest to stay outside Chicago's airspace. After about 15 miles the skies were clear all the way up to Waupaca. Two and a half hours later we were on the ground.

The Airventure show started today, we missed the first day but it goes all week. We'll be there tomorrow morning. Should be lots of pictures taken this week.

Warbirds

We may have been able to get to Waupaca today but we didn't even try. Today's forecast was 40-50% chance for thunder storms. Waupaca is about 220 miles North of Kankakee. At 6:30 this morning the radar was filled with nasty storms half way between us and Waupaca.

After breakfast we went over to the airport to get something out of the plane. The Collins Foundation had three WWII planes on display at the airport. Two bombers, a B-17 and a B-24 and a P-51 Mustang fighter. These are all in flying condition. We found out they were leaving today. They are on a tour with the planes and were heading up to Chicago. So we stuck around to watch.

Late in the morning a bunch of tail draggers (look it up) came into the airport just before a tail of the storm reached down to Kankakee. It was neat to see all them too. They are also heading towards the big show in Oshkosh.

The warbirds were starting to pack up and load the planes so we gave Christy, the flight engineer, a hand loading up the B-24. She had a bunch of oil jugs to load. The B-24 has four engines which each take 25 GALLONS of oil. After loading up, Christy climbed up on the wings to check the oil. We helped her with that too, from the ground.

She told us they run the engines at a reduced RPM compared to the way the military ran them in the war (full throttle). At the reduced RPM they use 50 gallons of gas per hour, per engine. 200 gallons per hour! Who knows how much gas they used per hour at full throttle.

About 2pm, after the storms had moved off to the East, the tail draggers took off and headed North. The weather was clear enough for the rest of the afternoon that they probably made it to Oshkosh. Maybe we'll get a chance to go tomorrow. Maybe not, the forecast is the same for tomorrow.

Here is the link for the Collins Foundation.
http://www.collingsfoundation.org/menu.htm

Here are some photos of today's fun.

B-17

B-24

P-51

What day is it?

Well plans sure changed yesterday. After spending 3 nights in Youngstown, OH (YNG) we were able to get moving again but not in the direction we had planned. The plan was to go North at the end of Lake Erie and go up the Michigan peninsula. The big high pressure that is covering the middle of the country has stalled a front over the upper Midwest. So the forecast up there was looking to be continued crap.

The other option, which is probably a shorter distance, is to go West to Chicago and then North into Wisconsin. That's what we tried. Late in the morning after waiting for the fog and haze to burn off we headed West towards Kankakee, IL (IKK). We had a number of alternate airports in mind along the way in case we didn't like what we saw weather wise. We went past Mansfield, OH and then the clouds got thick so we did a 180 and went back to Mansfield (MFD) for the night.

Today's plan was to continue to Kankakee and then maybe North to Waupaca, WI (PCZ). The weather was a little hazy but not bad. We did have a headwind today, so the ground speed was only 85-88 knots instead of the 115 we had been doing. Three hours after leaving Mansfield we landed in Kankakee.

It was very hot in Kankakee this afternoon, high 90's. The airport elevation is 630 feet but with the high temp and humidity the density altitude was around 3,800 feet. That means density of the air was equivalent to a 3,800 foot elevation. The runway at IKK is just under 6,000 feet long so it was plenty long enough. There were storms near Rockford so we stopped for the day. Here is a photo of the radar screen.

We have about another 220 miles to get to Waupaca, which is where we will park the plane while we go to the Airventure show. The forecast for the next few days has 30-40% chances of thunder storms so we may be here until Sunday or Monday. We might try to take that in smaller bits but we'll see.

We have now flown off the New York sectional chart and the Detroit sectional chart.

You want pictures? Here they are.

Some Packards.

The Scrappers!

Clouds (in case you couldn't tell).

45A tied down for the night in Mansfield.

On a culinary note, we found O'Charley's in Youngstown. It was very good. Pete had a California Salad and Dan had Salmon that was cooked on a cedar plank. It was a great pre-baseball dinner. As luck would have it, there was also one in Mansfield. So we ate at O'Charley's two nights in a row, in two different towns! If there is one near you, check it out (Turkey Lake and Sand Lake).

Take me out to.....

the ball game!!

Well our hotel is actually in Warren, OH. Right next to a mall with lots of stuff. Yesterday Pete got introduced to both Chipotle Mexican Grill and Harry Potter in the same afternoon! A couple of Dan's favorite things.

This afternoon Pete spent a couple hours at the Packard car museum here in Warren (Dan wasn't interested in the old cars today). And tonight we went just down the mall parking lot to watch the Mahoning Valley Scrappers play!

The Scrappers are a single A minor league team for the Indians. Tonight they played the State College Spikes. And the home team won, 6-1.

www.mvscrappers.com

We should get some photos of the past two days in later. Right now it's time for bed. We hope to continue west tomorrow.

Youngstown, OH

We had poor Internet connections in Ithaca so there wasn't an entry put in until today. This is the second entry today, so make sure to scroll down and see the Ithaca entry.

The forecast for the upper Midwest is for very high temps and a front to move in and stall. It is expected to create heavy rain and hail Monday and maybe Tuesday. So we decided to keep moving today before that mess gets here. The plan was to get another 250 miles to Medina, OH for a fuel stop then another hour or so on to Toledo for the night.

Well when we took off the conditions in the Cleveland area (where Medina is) were Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC), low visibility, fog and mist. We are doing this trip under Visual Flight Rules (VFR). The conditions were forecast to improve after 9am but they didn't. So we could not continue past Youngstown, OH. We'll be here for tonight and maybe a couple days depending on what that front does. Since the forecast contains the possiblity for hail, the plane is going to be in a hanger at the Youngstown airport for a day or two.

If we are still here tomorrow there is a VERY good chance the Harry Potter movie playing right next door will get seen!

Have any of you have been wondering what all the best dressed copilot / navigators are wearing these days?

Well that would be a multi-pocket vest. Very fashionable. The pockets are filled with cameras (2 of them), a Leatherman multi-tool, the checklist, life saver mints and who knows what else will end up in all those pockets.

That's it for now. We've been watching the US women's world cup soccer finals. Go USA!

Ithaca

First off, the second day in Bar Harbor was pretty mellow. We drove up to Orono where Shaw & Tenney is. That is a little shop that hand makes wooden oars. Pete has a rowing shell and uses their oars. Sam spent some time with us to show us how they are made. He also showed us the boat he and his brother built last winter.

We had a busy day yesterday (Friday July 15). The sky was nice and clear with cool temps in Bar Harbor so we loaded up the plane and started heading west. Pete brought the plane up to 6,500 feet since we were going to go over some hills in NH and VT. There were some clouds around those hills so we had to do a little zig zagging to stay out of them.

After passing those hills the landscape turned to farmland and then to wooded areas. Very different terrain over the 250 miles between Bar Harbor and Saratoga. We had a short stop in Saratoga for gas and lunch then continued on another 120 miles to Ithaca. On that leg we passed about 10 miles south of Hamilton, NY (anyone?).

It seems weekends in Ithaca are pretty busy because most of the hotels were booked up. There is a wine festival going on not far away. After we found a room, we headed over to Cornell University where Pete went for both his undergrad and graduate degrees.

We walked around the campus a bit and one of the stops was at the Sigma Phi fraternity house. Pete was a member of Sigma Phi when he was an undergrad. Since it's summer there wasn't much going on but Larry was in the house. Larry is a current member of Sigma Phi and let us in to look around the house after Pete told him who he was. Larry even greeted Pete with the secret handshake!

When Pete was back at Cornell for grad school, he and Peggy lived in a trailer up the hill behind campus. So we drove back there to see the spot where they lived. Back then one of the treats they had was a trip down the hill to Joe's restaurant. A big plate of spaghetti and meatballs was only a couple bucks. Well Joe's is still there! So we had dinner there on Friday night.

On Saturday we went over to the new boathouse that the Cornell sailing team uses on Cayuga Lake. The boathouse manager gave us a tour. He even let us take a boat out for a sail.

After sailing we walked down the street a short way to meet the new sailing coach. Brian took over the team last year and did very well, so Pete was very excited to meet him. Brian is a young guy who just got married a couple months ago. He and his new wife bought a house just down the shore from the boathouse. Brian's parents were also there helping them work on the house.