Our Slow Dance Through the Sky

Sep 2016 Our Slow Dance Through the Sky

It’s been a very interesting few days at the Triple Tree Fly-in in South Carolina. I arrived Triple Tree feeling on top-of-the-world, off for a fun few days with my buds Yvette & Bill Tracy in their Supercub – me in my Rans S7. We’d met up in Kentucky, topped off our tanks and flew southwest to 3A2 New Tazewell, Tennessee for our last fuel stop before crossing the mountains into North & South Carolina. Perfect plan. Perfect flight. Perfect, that is, until I checked in at Triple Tree. That’s when Registration told me I’d left my credit card back at my last fuel stop. What?! No way! Absolutely not ….. until I checked my baby-blue billfold and sure enough, no credit card. NO, not again. It’s been a couple years since I left my entire billfold on my way to OSH – now another penniless flying trip!

Amazingly, we had talked to a nice guy, Mitch Edwards, at 3A2 telling him we were a flight of 2 on our way to Triple Tree. He even gave me a few pointers on mountain flying. It turns out that Mitch was the man who saved the day for me.  After we took off, he found my credit card and called Triple Tree & left his name and number.  When I called him, he tells me “It’s only 130 miles, I’ll fly it over to you.” I said “No way”, he says “Yes, it’ll give me an excuse to fly my RV” and he did! Thank you to my new friend Mitch.

I discovered Lady Taildraggers LOVE Triple Tree. They came from Texas, Wisconsin, many from Florida and plenty of other states. We had a fun late afternoon meet ‘n greet on the shade on the Porch and were absolutely melting when we got our picture snapped. 5:00 p.m., 96 steaming degrees.

The Porch sits on high ground overlooking a large lake and the north end of the runway, just one of many scenic spots to while away the hours at Triple Tree.

Jack Pelton from the EAA spoke briefly to the Triple Tree group about 3rd class medical reform, getting the Dynon attitude indicator for certified production aircraft and answered questions from the crowd.

Seabee owned by E.T. and Melissa Tello

And then the fun began, our slow dance through the sky, a.k.a. our flight home. Triple Tree, SC, through the mountain pass (not over!), through the Cumberland Pass, meandering around this, checking out that, up and down and around the sky.

With three fun days at Triple Tree in our logbooks and work awaiting us Monday, our flight-of-two decided to take advantage of some beautiful flying weather and departed on Saturday.

We are the lucky few. Who gets to see sights like this but we GA pilots?

We had an awesome flight though the mountains loosely taking the highway pass that runs through Asheville, NC.  It was 10 a.m. when we entered the pass with smooth air and good visibility.

We flew lower and slower on this entire trip than my usual and soaked up the scenery like never before.

Weather we really didn’t want to mingle with was to our north so we picked London-Corbin Airport KLOZ in Kentucky to overnight. It was a great choice. Good restaurant on the field. Fantastic FBO with cookies, chocolate candy and donuts waiting! We even enticed a grounded Great Lakes pilot to share the courtesy van and took in Cumberland Falls while we were there. Lucky for us, the guy at the FBO couldn’t have been nicer and let us campout inside overnight with a choice of lounge chairs and sofas. Not a bad night’s sleep considering the unicom chatter, helicopters coming & going and a little random jet traffic.

Thanks to Bill & Yvette Tracy for helping me double down on tiedown ropes. I thought the FBOs short rope on each wing might do it until the weather moved in and the gusting kicked in.

The clouds were pretty mean looking for a while but the whole thing blew over quickly with little more than sprinkles hitting the ground. Both birds stayed secure.

That’s it. Smooth sailing back into Indy today with another great trip in my logbook.