Boy, I woke up at 4:30am and just couldn't sleep any longer. By 5am I sent Taco a text "Taco! Wake up! It is time to go." To which he immediately responded "I'm up, I'm up! What time is wheels up." Tanya and I were just sitting around looking at each other waiting for the sun to come up. We were socked in as expected with OVC 400-700 but we had long ago solved that problem, Twice.
We had to taxi up and down the runway and into the grass a bit "Vroom, Vroom!!!" to scare herds of early morning deer off. Picked up our clearance on the ground with Austin approach. We love the bluetooth cell coupled into the audio panel. That is a game changer. However, Tanya has yet to be able to have a telephone conversation with a headset on and audio coming through the "radio" without depressing the transmit button when she talks! It is funny, I have to whack her hand each time, and both headsets are Hot, so I can't say anything.
"090 on the heading, climb maintain 3000, expect niner thousand in 10..." And we're off. We popped out the top at around 2500' and were treated to a beautiful sunrise on top with the sun directly in our face for the next few hundred miles. All the while, Rosie was sitting on the ground in west Texas looking at similar weather... From the ground. We soon found Taco on freq out of Dallas and talked plenty of smack about how Rosie could do nothing but go to breakfast.
Hundreds of miles through Texas looked like this. We didn't start to see the ground until we got to Louisana.
So, here we are, fat dumb and happy on top just watching the miles click away, tracking nearest, loading nearest plates, all that stuff that you do so you're ready to pounce. That still wasn't enough to keep me entertained. The only music we listen to is the sweet purr of the fan turning up front. I did what any self respecting RV pilot would do. Find some more buttons to push, fiddle with some knobs, look at some more data or something, when I came across this EGT graph (this is a sloppy carb O320). Hmm, I wonder why #3 and #4 graphs are so noisy? Is that what a failing egt probe looks like? But what really peaked my interest with the perfectly timed burp of all egt every 60 seconds... What could that be? As I pondered the riddle...
I asked the resident Ham radio operator to please turn off her APRS radio. Yep that is it. With the aprs off, no egt data burp, with it on, 60sec egt data purp. "Ok, you can turn the aprs back on." That was fun.
Ok, what next. I guess Tanya wanted in on some action, so as we passed the timezone change, she decided to change the time on the chronometer. I don't know what buttons she pushed, but she bricked it! I don't care what button you push, it gives you nuttin' but 8s with one flashing. "Dude, that is annoying. Stop the flashing." "But there is no off switch for this thing."

sad Tanya
Then she came up with a plan. Fixed!
We stopped in Atlanta and had lunch with friends on the field with no major fanfare. When we got into Florida, it was clear that the smoke from fires was going to be a bit of an issue. It stretched for at least 100 mi and was visible on radar. It's base was about 6k' and top at about 11k'. We were at 9.5 vfr and didn't want to go down into the bumps, so we kindly went around.
Safe in Gainsville FL, hopped the Holiday Inn shuttle to the hotel and set off on foot to downtown for a great dinner (and beer!) at Harry's. Rosie just touched down and should be here shortly along with Sharkbait. Breakfast at Spruce Creek tomorrow, aiming for 9am currently.
