Friday, September 2, 2011

French Valley Final

Made it!! 26.9 hrs in the air. I'd estimated 25.






We waited around San Luis Obispo until about 11 waiting on fog, but that gave me time to review the Los Angeles terminal area chart for a VFR route through all the airspace, which was fruitless. But it also gave us time to visit Jake's favorite coffee shop.






I asked SoCal to let me through the B airspace, and they just said to squawk some code and "stay clear of the B" so we went around. Later a different controller gave me a vector into French Valley under the B and was really helpful. He laughed when he called to offer to cut me loose and I said "I'd really rather have help making sure I stay clear of the B".
On into Temecula was no sweat, but a bit breezy. We got a decent hotel for $75 and a car for $32... expected it to be a lot more expensive.
We had dinner in Temecula at a Bank converted to a restaurant.






The Uncle of my friend at work used to own downtown Temecula and live in this bank building. He used this vault as a walk-in closet.



I'm a believer in Sta-Bil gas stabilizer now; the car, motorhome and generator all started like they'd been shutdown over night and not 18 months. Even the batteries seem fine.
The car needed an alternator within about an hour so we towed it down to our RV spot in Escondido then had it fixed a mile and a half away.






We missed a couple planned stops on the way down because weather pushed us East and we'll overfly the Blyth geoglyphs later.
Jake wants to go on the trip back North, planned for May. We aren't sure if we'll camp - we hauled some stuff we didn't use much because there was no airport camping at most of the airports we were at. Maybe we could plan more rural airports, but we weren't really sure where we were going until the last minute each day, which I like. We want to try to go back more through WA, OR and CA.
Jake's wardrobe concession to SoCal...






It was a very fun trip.

End

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