Black Hills!

[vic syracuse]

Carol and I flew the 7 from Atlanta to Custer airport today, a little over 8 hours. What great traveling machines! A great trip except for the frontal penetration just sw of St. Louis, requiring a diversion and unplanned ILS into St. Loius Downtown. But the restaraunt was great, so we made up for the diversion.
Tim Olson and his family have met up here. We are planning to do the ground tours tomorrow, as the winds are supposed to be 20-30 mph, and then we are planning to fly to Devil's Tower in MT on Sunday morning.
Call if you get here and want to tag along.
Cell is 404-307-5133.

Vic

[Bubblehead]

Vic,

I put your number in a safe place and will give a shout. We will probably get to RAP mid afternoon - we're planning on doing a lot of sight seeing on the way up. We were going to drive up to Crazy Horse and Rushmore Sunday am but maybe we'll join you guys for the morning and do the tour in the afternoon. My cell is 708-856-7759.

John

[Bubblehead]

Left a little late but there was no hurry. 2.0 hrs to Harlan, Iowa where I met a couple RVers. One built a RV-7 200 hp and one built RV-9. I'll check my notes and post names later. Very nice guys. Then off to the Missouri River, then up past Sioux City. Used flight following most of the way, and luckily the MOA smack in the middle of the route was cold so we didn't have to detour at all.

Stopped at Wall, South Dakota, called Dave Hon for fuel, walked over to Wall Drug for lunch, then walked back to the airport. Met up with Dave, refueled and visited with Dave and a friend of his for a while. Then took off and flew south over the badlands then west to Rapid City. "Magnificent desolation" kept running through my mind along with the song "Pancho and Lefty."

The wind was 15 gusting to 25 from 170 at Wall and Rapid City, and the runways were 130 and 140. Made very good cross wind landings both times and an acceptable crosswind takeoff from Wall, although it wasn't as smooth as I would have liked. Oh, and it hit 100 F in Rapid City today! We didn't expect it to be nearly that hot this far north. Density altitude at Wall was 6500 feet so a fully loaded, fully fueled plane (and people) climbed ok but it wasn't the sparking climb I am used to with 1 person, 1/2 fuel and 1500 foot density altitude! This was the first flights with my Bell tailwheel and it has a remarkably more solid feel to it than the stock Vans unit.

At Rapid City the line boy helped tie us down, handled the bags and gave us a ride to the FBO. He also radioed to the FBO desk our name and rental car reservation info and the Budget people showed up with a car within minutes of our reaching the FBO!

It's been fun so far, and tomorrow we take the "dead Presidents" tour. Maybe go on over to Crazy Horse.

Vic - I think we'll be traveling by car Sunday so you and Tim and your families have a good time with the air tour.

[Bubblehead]

The rest of the trip was great. I had not been to Mt Rushmore for many years and did not know they had built up the parking ramps etc so much. The last time I was there all the parking was outdoors and you could see the mountain from anywhere. It was more rustic. Now it's pretty refined! Still beautiful, but not the same.

We also went to Crazy Horse and that was very impressive. We start building airplanes that may take 3 to 10 (or more) years to complete. The guy who started carving Crazy Horse into the mountain must have known he would never live to see it anywhere close to being done! After visiting Crazy Horse we had some great BBQ in Custer, SD, and took a lot of back roads through the Black Hills. All in all a fun day.

Monday was overcast with occasional rain in Rapid City. We hustled out to RAP, paid our tie-down bill ($14), loaded up, preflighted and launched. Ceilings were high and we went up to 7500 feet and arranged for flight following with Denver Center. Visibility under the ceiling was fine for the first hour but got slowly worse as the ceiling raised. We were legal but it wasn't as much fun as it might have been with clearer skys. The funny thing was my XM weather showed clear skies, and METARS along the route were the standard "10 mi visibilty, clr below 12000 ft." We ended up stopping at Cherokee County Airport just west of Fort Dodge, Iowa for fuel. Nice little airport, $4.78/gallon gas, and $0.50 for a coke! Nice people too.

For the last two hours to DeKalb, IL we went to 7500 feet to get better visibility. We dodged a few puffies along the way, and then visibility deteriorated again. We went up to 9500 feet and it was a little better. It was like we were right at the top layer of poor visibility! All turned out ok. We did a nice 500 fpm descent into KDKB and made a good landing. It was a great trip but like always, I was glad to get home.

One thing I am very thankful for. I bought a Xaon MRX TCAS unit at Oshkosh. I almost bought one at Sun-n-Fun and regreted it because we were in some low visibility on the way back. On this trip it gave me some comfort, although maybe a false sense of security. I still watched a lot outside the cockpit, but adding the MRX to my quick scan was great. We saw very few airplanes on the entire 9.8 hr trip, but the few we saw were picked up by the MRX before I saw them. There were also times when passing airports that I could hear guys on CTAF and picked them up with the MRX even though I could not see them.

I would not suggest concentrating solely on the MRX, because if someone's transponder is off or malfunctions the MRX won't pick them up. Keep eyes outside the cockpit. Between flight following and the MRX I felt like I had minimized the risks.