The day before The Day

So this is the day before The Day! Tomorrow, 6:30 am we'll drive to the airport in Vienna and take off toward Boston.

Of course, my mind circles around possible items I could have possibly forgotten. According to my checklist, everything should be alright. Here's a picture of all the stuff I am taking for 4 weeks.


As you cen see, there's all the usual stuff: some clothes to change, quite a few documents for the two gyros, logbooks, some gadgetry, the GPS and my helmet, and last but not least: a small red and white checkered cushion to rest my behind comfortably on those long legs in the gyro. Experience has told me that this is essential for creature comfort.

Robert will have a small laptop, a small printer, some stuff to prepare homeopathic remedies in the field (mortar, pestil, lactose, ethanol, assorted boxes, etc.) along, too. The laptop is so that we can stay in touch with the world, and the printer is to print out our maps from Jeppesen's FliteMap along the way. We insert those into our knee boards and thus avoid handling unwieldy paper charts (which we will carry anyway for legal purposes and flight planning).

Here is a picture after I packed everything:



There's a medium sized backpack which goes on the rear seat of the MT03 and a small backpack underneath my legs in the front. The black bag is going to be installed underneath the rear seat. It is removable and at the moment holds my helmet.

All in all, the baggage weighs in at 15 kg.

We'll arrive in Boston at 3 pm, pick up a rental car and drive to Lawrence, MA, to check into our hotel. Apart from a couple of beers and some relaxation, that'll be pretty much it for Friday. Saturday and Sunday will be devoted to assembling our gyros at the airport in Lawrence (LWM). They came in a 20' container, pretty heavily disassembled. "Akoschier" (on this forum) has kindly offered some hangar space and tools so that we can unload and get on our way.

That's it for now. I think I'll just continue to post in this thread. There will be an external link where you can see the live GPS track of our flight so that you can follow along.

I guess you can tell that we're pretty excited.

-- Robert & Chris