Woo hoo, we made it to Saturday! Our last day in Iowa!
Steven woke up feeling a bit congested and I asked if he wanted to take any meds. He said no – he didn’t feel like spending the time researching what medications are allowed/disallowed by the FAA. Ahh yeah. Smart. Kind of forgot about that. (Some basic googling shows that MucinexD (pseudoephedrine & guaifenesin) is okay!)
I was confused about what time we were leaving and thought we were taking off at 9:00. That was NOT the case and we didn’t leave until after lunch. Yay for more time with family!
So we started the morning with donuts from Icon and chais from Starbucks.
Then we got to do something really fun – go to William’s first soccer game!
He had just started practice the week before, and I was impressed with the level the kids were playing at with just a bit of practice. It was fun to watch and made me miss playing soccer.
I was so grateful for our extra time together, and especially that we got to go to William’s game. I miss a lot of that stuff being in a different state, so it felt special to get to go.
After the game we picked up sandwiches for lunch, and ate at my snister’s and played a bit more of Over/Under, then we did some flight planning (including “packing” the VFR (visual flight rules) data again), and my snis dropped us off at the airport. We are so grateful for her shuttling us around so much on the duration of our visit!
We went into the FBO (fixed-based operator) and confirmed they had fueled the plane, paid for the fuel, then I packed all our stuff in the plane while Steven did some of the preflight and plane inspection.
Then we went inside and did the final briefing – we always do this right before we fly so we have the most current information. Because it had warmed up so much (19C/66F) it was a bit windy – 18 knot steady, 25 knots gusty. But we had mostly clear skies to fly in, which meant we got to go up to 5500′. Yay!
We finished preflight, did run-up, and took off 3:33.
As we were ascending, ATC (air traffic control) let us know that the Cessna 172S (exact same model as us!) that took off right before us was going on the same heading. What are the odds, right?
So we were basically buddies for their whole flight to Dubuque, about half our trip. On the screenshot below we are the blue plane and they are the lower marker with the -2, meaning they were 200 feet below us. You can’t tell but they were also 5 miles to our south. I kept trying to find them visually but couldn’t. But I felt them in spirit. And appreciated that they changed their course to be a little south of ours.
We got to cross the Mississippi River in the daytime (much different than our flight in!) and I enjoyed seeing Dubuque from above!
The Iowa part of the flight was pretty chill, and the begining of Illinois was too. I should have asked Steven if I could fly a bit. Regerts. (Misspelled on purpose.)
Randomly though, there was traffic in the middle of nowhere Illinois that went right over as, at 1000′. What are the odds? This is the kind of stuff it’s good to have ForeFlight for. I don’t think we would have seen this guy above us until he was above us, which would have been frightening. Steven lowered our altitude a bit – you can see the difference in two images below – 5,335′ vs 5,084′. I wonder if the other pilot would have increased his altitude if we hadn’t descended.
After that we got closer to Rockford airport and some class Delta airports and then there was a lot of traffic. Lame, but understandable. Nothing that came that close to us again, thankfully!
And then as we started to get closer to the Chicagoland airspace the transponder lost wifi again. Wonderful. The image above shows what kind of traffic we were seeing when that happened.
No worries though, we have eyeballs. This used to stress me out (not having this data) but it doesn’t anymore. Steven did ALL his training without this information. We don’t actually need it, it’s just a “nice to have.”
And I was able to spot some planes with my eyes. Good work, Kim! (it’s harder than it seems during the day)
Our home airport had a bit of traffic but we were first in line to land. There was a funny moment where ATC told the plane behind us they were clear to land and they were like “I think I am #2.” I had been confused why they were telling them! ATC corrected it quickly and told us we were clear to land.
We landed at 5:27 and taxied to our ramp.
After we finished all the post-flight stuff and were walking to the car to unload our things before dropping off the book/keys, I said to Steven “I know we just got back but it looks like a really nice day for flying.” Ha. He was probably so worn out! He got 8.7 hours in on this entire trip!
But I do hope we fly again soon 😉
