Heading for AK

Jake and I will be taking off for Alaska in a day or two.  We're planning a different route than we came down, but last time the "plan" fell apart in less than two days so we'll see... weather could push us east again.

We're planning to visit friends and relatives (that are friends TOO!) in CA, tour Evergreen State College in Olympia, visit Seattle (on the bus from Oly) and a friend on Bainbridge and then pretty straight home via the trench (Mackenzie to Watson Lake). We're not going to camp out unless forced to and probably fly more hours per day than last time. We're also bringing winter gear - The Yukon and AK will probably be fine, but anything can happen in early May.

The SPOT tracker link on top left of this page and http://tinyurl.com/southbound2011 will work. We'll probably post on this blog (davidearl.com links to here too), more often if I can figure out how to get Blogger mobile to post photos that aren't blurry.

Also, do you realize that we have to file with Customs and Border Protection to LEAVE the US?  Doesn't that seem wrong?  When I was a kid I remember thinking that was one of the things wrong with Eastern bloc countries... "They have to get Permission to leave!".  And to get back in, we have to file electronically, 90 day password changes, 24 hours in advance, with threats of 5000 dollar fines if we miss our arrival window.  But to get into Canada?  A phone call. "Land of the free" my ass.

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Coolidge airport

We are at a really cool airport between Phoenix and Tuscon http://www.coolidgeaviation.com/.  It's a WWII airport and they are still using (and improving) this neat hanger.

Lots of fun transient aircraft, this AN-2 is registered in Valdez.

The hangers have everything from warbirds and homebuilts to Citations in them.  The owners are real nice, opening up their hanger doors and showing us around when we drop in.

This DC-7 is airworthy.

There are a few C-130's in various states of repair, some used for spraying fire retardant and oil dispersant.

Some of the locals gave me some surplus 757 (I think) chairs I'm putting to good use...

We had a tailwheel shimmy problem pretty much the entire way down.  The tailspring was bent a little (the old one is on top of the new one here).

We've replaced every tailwheel part from the bellcranks back so hopefully we have it fixed for the trip home.

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Cochran Ovens

Jake and I went looking for the Cochran Coke Ovens. We'd heard they were nearby, alternately called furnaces, ovens and smelters by the local pilots we talked to, they turn out to be kilns that made coke from mesquite for use in smelters...  I presume for Copper since I think it was next to the Copper Basin Railway.

We found them by searching the internet - it's a popular 4X4 trip to the ovens up this river bed.

Lots of nice scenery.

We finally found the ovens after a couple false passes.  They weren't exactly where my GPS said and I strafed some likely looking rock formations first... but once they appeared it was obvious :-)

 
 

There are smelters and a ghost town somewhere that go with these... we'll try to find them some other time.

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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 :-)

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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.

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