Slow going

Still not much flying to be had, but now I've got a couple days of flying that I can mention.

Off to Winnipeg for Friday night.. Ooooo, and then Kelowna for Saturday night which sounds much better. I'll hopefully get to meet up with Craig during my stay in Kelowna and check out his pimp new condo.

Then it is Vacation time, I'll be in Vancouver from July 30th to August 13th - a full 2 weeks. I am likely to be taking some side trips during that time as well, but hopefully I'll get a chance to see many of you at some sort of summertime functions!

9 years ago today...

I was given the fateful words by my flight instructor "ok, so, take it out for a circuit by yourself, have fun."

I took to the sky by myself for the first time and managed to take the Cessna 152 C-GPFE for a quick 6 minute flight which included a takeoff, return and landing!

Sadly I learned one day while in Castlegar during my commercial flight training I received news of a mid air collision over Surrey where some people were killed. It was that airplane and another that were involved.

It was after about 10hrs of flight instruction that I was released to fly by myself and what an experience it was. I believe I had white knuckle the whole time, the adrenaline rushing, it's a memory I won't soon forget.

So, 9 years later here I am, "livin the dream".

San Francisco and a little Mexico

We had a rental car while we were in Napa and we quickly realized that we were in very close proximity to San Francisco! It is a destination that I, and the other pilot Mike, have wanted to visit but never had a good layover there.

So once we found out we were going to Mexico for sure, we figured we'd better take advantage of our one free day and make the drive down to San Fran. It was a pretty easy 30 min drive and we weren't exactly sure what we wanted to see. We definately wanted to check out the Golden Gate Bridge and then some of the touristy places near downtown so we decided to more or less just wing it. That we did, without a map, we got lost on our first exit. Haha, it took some time to regain our tracks, but after that first missed exit ramp we were on the right track.

Click picture for photo album

Here's a photo album with some pictures of everything we did. It also has a couple of pics from our trip out the next day to Cabo San Lucas Mexico for a pick up. That happened on Saturday, then another crew took over the plane to return back to Napa to retrieve the wine auction people.

I am currently at home in Calgary getting some paperwork and yearly exam stuff done, I'm also sweating a lot as it is a bit of a heat wave here in Calgary and the afternoons and evenings are very very toasty in the house.

Back from Dallas, now in Napa Valley

Well jet training went well and I arrived back into Calgary late last night. It was straight to work though, and this afternoon I headed off for Napa Valley via Spokane for customs.

So far so good, however I must say.. as soon as you get a couple miles out of Napa it is a bit of a shady area around these parts! I'll just say that we've been locking the car as we drive around town. Haha. We're thinking of maybe driving down to San Fransisco (45mins away) but it looks like our schedule is changing every second. We may be off to Mexico on Saturday, then back to Calgary with a stop in San Diego. Then on Sunday we'll do a bunch of hopping around California, ending up back in Napa to take these folks back up to Calgary. They asked me how much wine we could fit in the airplane - this trip is all for a big wine auction going on. So I've limited them to 12 cases of wine for the way back.

As for Dallas, it was a good time. We had lots of fun in the simulator. I'll post up some pics soon from the training. All set in that regard for another year.

Heading back to Dallas

Time for my recurrent Jet training in Dallas TX. I'll be attending Simuflite at the DFW airport for the Citation Excel Friday until Tuesday, with travel days Thursday and Wednesday. It's only 1 week this time and not the 3 weeks like I had for my initial training. This is a much more manageable time away from home.

I'll take some pics again while down there of the sim unit, it is a big toy that is fun to play with. However this year they're going to try their hardest to kill us in that thing. Should be good times.

On a side note, I got a call from Ian as he was just traveling back through town after a family get together out in the prairies. He and his sister Carla had flights booked today to go back to Vancouver and spent last night with family here in Calgary. I met up with them this morning and we had coffee. I also happened to see we had an empty flight on one of the jets flying to Vancouver today, so I made a couple calls and got them on our jet instead! They got to live it up in style for an hour on their way back to Vancouver. It's great when things work out like that, sounds like they had a good time too.