Tucson: Missile Museum (fantastic). San Xavier Mission. Pima Air Museum (the snack bar there is NOT a culinary highlight). AMARC (Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center) facility in which $27 billion worth of airplanes sit idle, all originally paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, who is now paying to keep them parked on the firm Arizona soil. Dinner at El Guero Canelo. World’s best hot dogs ($2 including chile, beans, mustard, bacon, mayo (important Spanish phrase: “sin mayonesa”)). I watch the stars from the hotel hot tub. Tony decides to spend the evening watching a Discovery Channel special about a guy who crashed his ultralight in the African wilderness and spent days, badly injured, trying to survive. We had been having a debate about whether to follow I-10 very closely to Las Cruces and down to El Paso or whether to take a short cut along a railroad track through a sparsely settled area. The show seems to settle the debate.
Friday: We departed Tucson 30 minutes before sunrise. The headwind was stronger than forecast, about 25 knots right on the nose. At various times the GPS was reading less than 50 knots of ground speed and we could look down and see cars passing us on Interstate 10. We reworked our schedule to stop earlier than planned for fuel at Cochise/Wilcox (P33). Our second stop was Deming, New Mexico, home of $3.20 per gallon Avgas from a truck and free microwaveable sandwiches and burgers. We stopped for lunch at Las Cruces, New Mexico. We stopped for fuel at Van Horn, Texas (VHN), an airport that has been stripped down to the basics. There is no fuel truck, so you hover taxi right up to the pumps. There is no soda machine. Fortunately, a rich rancher lives nearby and an enormous Citation X bizjet was waiting for him. The Netjets pilots were happy to toss me a cold Diet Coke while we chatted.
Just as it was getting dark, we shut down in Fort Stockton, Texas (FST). Greg, a local pilot, was volunteering at the front desk/radio. He came out and pumped our fuel for us, handed us the keys to the courtesy car (Jeep Grand Cherokee), and suggested hotels and restaurants. Just as we were leaving, Cliff Clark landed in his Aviat Husky, a steel-tube-and-fabric taildragger airplane reminiscent of a Piper Cub from the 1930s. We all ended up at K-Bob’s, part of a chain and yet the finest steakhouse in Fort Stockton (also the only steakhouse in Fort Stockton, a town where folks get excited over the opening of a new IHOP). I spent most of the dinner asking Cliff about his 20 trips from Southern California to Alaska and back. All of these trips were in two-seat taildragger aircraft, either the Husky or an earlier feebly powered (115 hp) Citabria.
Cliff made it to Provideniya, Siberia, across the Bering Strait. Cliff made it all around the west and north coasts of Alaska. Cliff did all of this with no instrument rating and, in many cases, with no instruments. Many of these trips were before the advent of GPS.
It has been kind of cold on this trip, except when we’ve actually been inside the helicopter. A lot of indoor spaces in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas are not heated. It is so hot in the summer that they think heat is superfluous. Yet it has been below freezing overnight in many of the places that we have visited, and an airport lounge at 6:30 am offers no respite from the cold. So I decided to stop in the Fort Stockton Walmart and buy a down vest. I figured it would compress easily into one of the few remaining corners of luggage space under the seats in the R22. None of the ten employees that I talked to in the Walmart knew what a “down vest” or “down jacket” was. So it must truly be hot most of the year!
Saturday: We departed Fort Stockton before sunrise and stopped in Ozona (OZA) and Junction (JCT) for fuel, then Bulverde, Texas (1T8) for an oil change at Helicopter Experts, a Robinson dealer and flight school. We had lunch with a helicopter instructor who told us how a moment of inattention had resulted in a dynamic rollover (wrecked helicopter; nobody hurt). The student had 16 hours and was trying to move the helicopter sideways out of its parking spot. The instructor was looking backwards to see if other helicopters and airplanes were out of the way at this busy training airport. Flight training in helicopters truly requires superhuman attention to detail and a certain amount of good luck. We had planned to stop at West Houston (KIWS) only to refuel, but found that all hotel rooms closer to New Orleans, e.g., in Beaumont, Texas, were booked.
Here’s the map:
http://fly.dsc.net/u/Plan?fueld=10&tas=85&winddir=0&windspeed=0&pid1=22216&pid2=14997&pid3=5507349&pid4=16340238&pid5=5515089&pid6=5508090&country=US
Note with a click on any waypoint you can get the latest weather at the closest reporting stations, a list of nearby airfields each with a Google map aerial photo if you wish and some other basic data.
thanks for an interesting post to your blog.
With respect to buying a down vest in West Texas. I asked my wife who is from the West Texas town of Knot about your visit to Walmart. She suggests that the next time you need a down vest in West Texas that you ask for a “hunting vest or hunting jacket” (pronounced “hunt’n”).