Day 4 – Sunny and green

Last night Robert and I didn´t really fall asleep; rather, we fell unconscious. You could have probably stolen our appendix and we wouldn´t have noticed. At 5 am, however, our internal alarm clock woke us up to a beautiful day. The sun was already coming up, the sky was clear and the air crisp. If ever there was a day meant to be spent flying, this was it. With everybody else in the house (John, Deyanne and their 3 lovely kids) still fast asleep, we set to work to prepare for the day. Since I hadn´t done my homework of writing yesterdays travelog, I got right to it. The remainder of the morning was spent preparing for the flight: studying the route, programming the GPS, preparing the maps for the kneepad, etc. Deyanne drove us to town where we got a coffee at Starbuck´s and uploaded the travelog to Robert´s webpage.

I hadn´t seen Deyanne for over 10 years and it was hard saying goodbye again after only such a short time.

A cab dropped us off at the airport, where we topped our tanks off before taking to the air. Our next fuel stop was going to be Penn Yan (KPEO). Clearly, our flying machines looked forward to this day´s flying as much as we did. Generally, after the initial problems of getting them ready to fly, they were in perfect condition. The rotor ran smoothly with the engine purring in the back and every needle on the dash squarely in the green. I didn´t expect anything less from this quality machine.

The weather conditions were just as you would expect after passage of a cold front: cool and dry air which let you look once around the globe paired with sunny skies. The scenery was very quaint and pretty with lush shades of green dominating the landscape below. Here are a few impressions:

Robert and I had switched to 123.025 MHz as our air-to-air frequency. We flew in a very loose formation at between 2000 and 4000 feet MSL. We couldn´t get enough of the endless expanse of green and enjoyed the view which the higher altitude afforded. It seemed that we were the only ones up flying because only once did we encounter some metal traffic in the shape of a Cessna.

Penn Yan is a nice airport nestled in between the upstate New York finger lake region. The peculiar elongated shape of these lakes gave them their name.

We landed in Penn Yan and refueled there. After this first leg of the day, which lasted about 2:30 hours, Robert and I both needed a bit of a rest.

Originally we had planned to fly into Eerie (KERI) since it has a runway right at Lake Eerie. But John and Deyanne had told us that Eerie was not such a great place to visit and instead recommended Dunkirk (KDKK). When I told the lady attending the FBO at Penn Yan about our destination, she agreed with this but said that hotels in or around Dunkirk were inordinately expensive with prices ranging in the mid 200 U$ range. She told us about Jamestown (KJHW), where hotels are still affordable. We took her advice and set off for Jamestown.

We were surprised to see a couple of ski slopes with associated lifts on the way. On one slope there was even some patches of snow left. Some particular features exerted a magic pull and we dove down low to buzz around a bit. Particularly a beautiful lake nestled in between some steep inclines had us buzzing it once in either direction. Unfortunately we completely forgot to take pictures in the excitement.

When we arrived in Jamestown, we were greeted by the lone airport attendant, Rob. He was extremely friendly and helpful, offering us free hangar space and a courtesy car to town. This was in stark contrast to, e.g., Lawrence, where two nights in the hangar set us back 200 U$. And that was supposed to be a good deal!

In that hangar we discovered a Canadian CL-41 jet trainer which – according to Rob – was built in 1961 and had been flown by the Snowbirds (an aerobatic group) as well as the Malaysian army.

Originally we wanted to improvise some tarps from material we had bought earlier, but since the gyros are spending the night in the hangar, we postponed that bit until tomorrow.

Tomorrow we are definitely maybe going to make the tarp first and then fly onward to the shore of Lake Eeri and press on to Mentone (C92), where we want to spend the night.

I hope that the live tracking is working OK. Some people report only being able to see a blank sqare where the map is supposed to be. Robert has already asked his programmer to look into this, so please bear with us...

See yall tomorrow, – Rob & Chris.