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Day 20 – The final leg
Today was going to be the completion of our journey: the flight from Corona down the coast to Gillespie (KSEE), near San Diego. We had postponed the trip from yesterday to today because of weather. Yesterday we had some rain and low clouds with a stiff westerly wind. There was actually thunder audible and the news reported brush fires from lightning strikes in the area. Today was supposed to be sunny skies all day but actually ceilings turned out to be 2500 broken, 3500 overcast with some occasional scud at 1800. Visibilities were OK with a bit of haze near the coast, as is usual for this time of year.
I checked my email in the morning, and John (“All_in”) was expecting our touch down at Gillespie at 2 pm sharp. So we checked out at 11:30, returned the rental car and were at the airport at 12:00. When we preflighted our gyros, we each found a little farewell present from Scott.
I guess he keeps them at the hangar and never flies without them. Maybe I gotta try that, too.
Taxiing to the fuel island, we drew the usual curious bystanders and gladly answered their questions. This is part of what this trip is all about: getting people interested in gyros and showing them that gyros are more than lawn chairs with rotors. They are reliable, fun to fly, and you can actually go places with them.
We took off at 12:40 and headed south toward Dana Point with a couple of hills to cross on the way to the beach. Even though we had seen the Pacific on our arrival to Corona flying in the Bell helicopter with Scott, this was the first time our gyros ever got to see it.
We dropped down to to about 100 feet and buzzed right along, only popping up to 2000 feet to clear the restricted area of Cape Pendleton. We were talking to Socal Approach and got a clearance trough the San Diego Class Bravo so that we could cut the detour around it short and arrived 5 minutes earlier at Gillespie. After we had turned off runway 27R, we didn´t quite know where to taxi when suddenly a voice chimed in and told the ground controller where to steer us. I had a hunch that this must have been John (“All_in”). My hunch proved right, because when we turned around, we could already see him waving and directing us. There was John (2nd right), his brother Greg (2nd left) and Dave (“dabkb2”, 1st right) already waiting for us:
We just had gotten out of our gyros when a reporter from San Diego Channel 6 arrived and interviewed us. It is supposed to air today at 10 pm.
After some more jabbing and chatting we were offered a hangar space for our gyros, which turned out to be this cavernous, humongous, empty hangar. We almost didn´t know where to put our birds with all that space at hand.
Dave, John, Robert and I then went for a beer, dinner, and another beer (or was it the other way around?) and talked about flying and gyros. John has about 1001 stories to tell, so we still are waiting for the other 995 
This has been a great adventure and a fun trip. I can´t grasp it all yet, but in a couple of days I will try to post a wrap up and maybe some deep insights (yeah, right!). I thank you all for having come along with us and supported our endeavor either morally or factually. Without you, this adventure would not have been possible. Please accept Robert`s and my sincere thanks for everything!
– Robert & Chris.
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