We had such a lovely day yesterday! We took the day off work, flew to Rachel and Kevin’s house in Edgerton, WI, hung out with them on their boat, ate lunch at a restaurant on the water, then flew home!

It was such a beautiful (hot!) day – temps in the high 80s, clear blue skies. Lovely for being on the water (hot in the plane when it’s not moving, ha). Thank you Rachel and Kevin, for your wonderful hospitality!

On the flight back, Rachel texted me this timehop photo and said “It’s our friendiversary!!!!!” Aww! I had no idea! We met 12 years ago running the 50K at the North Face Endurance Challenge. We were blogger friends but had never met in person. I’m so glad she came up to me that day. We instantly hit it off, and we’ve been good friends since then. She’s someone who always fills my cup and leaves me feeling energized!

I’m putting all the flight details under the “read more”! Because you know me, it’ll get long. But there was an exciting part on the way there so you may want to keep going.

I’ll start with saying it takes an hour and a half to drive to Rachel’s house. Flying there is just for the fun of it, and is not necessarily faster time-wise (it was on the way home because we had a tailwind).

I thought there was a chance we’d arrive at the airport near Rachel an hour and a half after we left the house, but we had several delays at the airport:

• Someone else was flying MA (one of the Cessna 172s we use, N378MA) so we had to wait for them to finish
• When we walked out MA was being fueled so we had to wait for that to do preflight

• Then we did preflight and checked the oil and thought we might need to add more so we requested a quart of oil (and had to wait for that)
• Then we got in line to taxi and were behind a jet that was told it had to wait due to ORD traffic. Steven and I chatted and he wondered if he could request to depart before the jet – we could turn left onto the runway from where we were. Then Steven saw the plane behind us do that, then tower contacted us and asked if they missed a call from us (I was proud of myself for listening for our call number and following what they were saying cause Steven missed that and I was able to help him). Steven told them no, then asked for clearance to depart and they let us go!

We left at 11:05 am. We left the house at 9:30 am!!!! Ha. I wasn’t annoyed at all. Would I have liked more time with Rachel? For sure! But you can’t rush any of these things.

We did some new things on the flight there – Steven tried out mounting the iPad to the window so he could see traffic on ForeFlight. He liked it and will use it again, he just has to work on making the iPad part of the scans he does while flying. I had another iPad in my lap that I was checking occasionally for traffic as well. (I also have a sectional (map) in my lap as backup in case the iPads fail or die).

STEVEN LET ME TRY FLYING for a few minutes (he had his hand on his yoke the whole time)! The yoke only, I didn’t use the pedals. So I basically moved the yolk to the left and right to try to stay on course. I pulled it in and out too, to get us level. Steven already had it trimmed out perfectly (It would fly straight and level on its own) and didn’t need to let me try, but I really liked it and am excited to try again.

Airplanes 101! Moving the yoke to the left and right moves the ailerons, pulling it in and out moves the elevators, and the pedals move the rudder. After I was “done” flying Steven showed me what it would have been like if we only moved the rudder and didn’t use the yoke. It was… interesting… wobbly. I told him that’s fine to do with me but not with any passengers!!!

But I was really excited he let me try!

We flew over Rachel and Kevin’s lake on the way in, and could even see their dock and boats!

Then it was time to play the “where’s the airport?” game. Steven had looked at Jana Airport on Google Earth and had a good idea of what the grass strip looked like, but when you’re up in the air, it’s hard to find! We did a circle and found it, and were too high to land, so we went around again and landed at 11:54 am.

We flew in right over some trees and a house. We’re obviously well above them in the photo below but it felt close (to me only) in the plane.

After we landed on that bumpy ass narrow runway we turned around to drive back and look for tie-downs. We didn’t find any, and even walked around looking so we just left the plane and crossed our fingers that it wouldn’t blow over (it didn’t).

Rachel picked us up! It was about 5 minutes from her house. Rachel and Kevin both dropped us off in the afternoon. We did preflight (one strobe was out, good thing we weren’t flying in the dark) and took off at 6:04. Rachel and Kevin watched from the street, and the man and his son from the house across the street watched too. They were so cute! I saw them and waved as we drove over to the runway to depart.

The density altitude was high so the plane took longer to takeoff. And there were power lines at the end of the runway. It was fine of course, but in my head I was like “errrrrr.” Ha ha.

We had a tailwind on the way back and were cruising at 130+ knots! Our flight was estimated to take only 30 minutes, but we had traffic closeby that we wanted to get away from, so we did two circles to let them get 5 miles ahead. All that to say, we landed at 6:39 (it was my first time landing at runway 14, the short runway) and got home at 7:13. Much quicker than on the way there!