Tuesday, March 20, 2012

SoCal to AZ

We left Southern CA and went over to Coolidge AZ, stopping in Yuma to pick up a bicycle (1984 Schwinn 10-speed) I'd bought in Phoenix a few years ago and left at a friends house.


The kids liked SoCal fine...  Jake the Disneyland Dandy...

Hanna...


Once again, I was glad we had a case of water with us :-)


We ran along the Mexico border (where the ground turns from green to brown) for quite a while which made me nervous.  I kept calling Yuma (which is actually a Marine base and controller) and saying "You're going to keep me out of trouble here, right?".  They were great about it.


 And I watched this GPS like a hawk.  :-)  (Yes it's an old picture from on the ground in Palmer).


We borrowed a vehicle at the Yuma FBO and had lunch downtown. I wish we had some photos of Yuma - Jake liked it a lot (the art deco downtown mostly)  but he took only movies.

Shannon's house was in fine shape, we took a bunch of photos to send her...



My bike was fine, too.




Somewhere on the way we flew over Donnelly (no relation) Ranch :-)


We then went up to Blythe, Ca.  A cool old desert airport.  We overnighted there with the plane and the motor home at an RV park on the river. The next day we found that Blythe was out of gas.  They were organizing a pickup truck run to town for cans of autogas, but we had enough to make Coolidge.

We renumbered the plane before we left SoCal, too.  Culminating a 5 year effort...



Before we left AK, I had planned to see these geoglyphs so had the coordinates in my GPS. We asked at the Blythe FBO and it was apparently a common question because they had an entire notebook of photos and better GPS coords so we updated ours and took off.  They are about 120 feet tall and there's also a snake we didn't get a picture of.



We ended at Coolidge - a very cool WWII airport with lots of neat planes and nice people.  They're still using the 1940's hanger.  This is a stock photo during the monthly fly-in, right now there's only 5 GA planes on the ramp - two of which are from AK :-)


End