Homecoming

We are very lucky to have had Dave Stauffer taking these pictures at Mountain Airpark when we arrived last Thursday. Thanks Dave and thanks to all who came out to welcome us home. It was great to see each of you.

Youtube Link

America

OK. So I had this piece of music in my head and wanted to use it. But there is so much material left to use so we will have a final blog entry to finish up after this one. We saw so much of this great country but really only so a small part if you think about it. Hope you enjoy this.

Youtube Link

Darrell

May 17

Well we made it home about 1:30 Thursday afternoon. We finished up with a flight past the Gateway to the West in St Louis and a short flight down the Mississippi then home. We are tired but elated from the experience of the last 13 days. We are putting together a final video for the trip this weekend so check back. Here is the video of the flight back to North Georgia.

Youtube Link

Thanks to everyone who showed up at the arrival to welcome us home. What a surprise! We did not get any usable pictures or video on our cameras of the arrival so if you have some, would you share them with us? Thanks again.

The Skydogs

May 16 Debrief

Well we finally have a good internet connection and a little while to catch up with the blog.

So yesterday, the high point of the day was flying into Leadville Co, which is the highest public airport in the CONUS. We had to be very careful of the weight the airplanes were carrying (fuel, luggage and us) and the weather conditions (Temp, wind and pressure). We skipped stopping at Leadville last week because the weather was not good and we have kept our eye on Leadville weather for a week now. It was perfect yesterday so we skipped an extra day in Yellowtone and high-tailed it for Salida then Leadville.  Here is the video from yesterday.

Youtube Link

From Leadville we flew to Minden NE which is the home of The Pioneer Museum. This was a fabulous collection of all things American spanning the last 150 years. If you are ever in the area it is a must see. The kids will never see or understand alot of how life developed in our country unless they see it first hand and they can in Minden. Some of this video was Minden and some is just favorate shots.

Youtube Link

Today we flew from Minden to Litchfield IL, which is just northeast of St Louis MO. We enjoyed a great dinner at Stella's Route 66 Diner. You should make a stop there also. It was great food at good price. Tomorrow morning we will leave Litchfield and fly over to St Louis and get some pictures of us flying past The Arch. Should be a great photo op.

Then, Home We Come! And I think I can speak for everyone, we are ready to be home.  We plan on arriving about 1:00 pm tomorrow at Mountain Airpark in Cleveland. Come see us if you can.

I plan on doing a wrapup of the trip so check back over the weekend.

Darrell and the Skydogs

Yellowstone

Sorry for the delay, here is the video of our day in Yellowstone. Enjoy.

Youtube Link

May 14 belated

We had a great tour of Yellowstone yesterday and got out of West Yellowstone about 3 yesterday afternoon. We have many great pictures and video we will share. Landed at Salida CO about 8:00 last night, hungry and tired. Could not blog. We will do the video after we fly up to Leadville this morning.

It is great to be in Colorado.

Darrell

May 14 - Yellowstone Tour then to CO

It is sunny and 57 in West Yellowstone this morning. Beautiful. We have a car to be delivered at 8 and we plan on a tour of Yellowstone til about noon or 1:00. We will leave the car at the airport and fly to Salida CO this afternoon. Probably fly down the east side of the mountains past Denver (Hi Aunt Jean and brother Rusty). We will slept over in Salida and go into Leadville in the morning. Wow.

A good friend of ours who built a RV8 and flys it all over says that "these little airplanes are time machines". Now we know exactly what he was talking about.

Anyway, have a great day and we'll talk soon.

Darrell

Skydog down?

Youtube Link

May 13 - Debrief

Left Kalispell about 10 am headed for West Yellowstone Airport in MT. A big thanks to Tony Williams for providing a Suburban for us to use while we were in Kalispell. Much appreciated Tony.

We got to Yellowstone after a very nice flight and NOBODY was there! The airport was closed and we were locked in. All the gates were padlocked. No one could get in AND no one could get out! We were lucky that a couple had flown in about two hours earlier and somehow got lock combinations, finally rented a car and were back at the airport to pickup their bags. We got hotel contact info from them and called The Branding Iron Hotel, the hotel sent a car to pick us up. We have had dinner now and are trying to organize a car so we can tour the Park for half a day tomorrow. Almost everything is closed in Yellowstone this time of the year. This is an adventure after all.
We are keeping an eye of the weather in Colorado as the only stop we have missed in landing in Leadville CO. The highest elevation airport in the country. We will alter plans as necessary to accomodate this stop.

The airplanes are working perfectly and we are still have a great time.

Darrell, Mike, Harry, Mike and Bob

May 12 Debrief

This is incredible. We have traveled over 3500 miles and been to a dozen planned venues in 8 days. From Liberal KS to Shiprock to Monument Valley to Grand Canyon to Death Valley to Chino CA to Monterey to San Francisco to Aurora OR to Columbia River Gorge to Kalispell to Glacier National Park, everything has worked far better than we planned or expected. We are so thankful for this opportunity and really had no idea how amazed and in awe we would be at this wonderful country and the people in it. We wish each of you could have come along. I know the music selection and the places we vistied today don't really match but the music is what we felt when we experienced the day. Enjoy.

Youtube link

(Personal note:  I hope my grandsons Jasper, Baxter and Grayson see the train running along the Columbia River in the video. It was a very long train.)

Tomorrow we travel from Kalispell to Yellowstone National Park and we plan to spend a couple days there just to see the sights and rest.

Darrell

May 12 Plan

This morning we plan to fly up the Columbia River to Pendelton. This will take us just north of Mt. Hood then the Columbia River Gorge. We will stop at Pendelton to refuel then fly direct to Kalispell MT. We have transportation arranged there so we hope to spend the afternoon at Glacier National Park seeing the sights.

Darrell

May 11 Debrief

Just watch and enjoy...

YouTube link

May 11

Well I finished the post for yesterday at 11:30 last night and thought I would get up early to enter our plan for the day. That didn't happen. I slept in til 6:00 (9:00 my time) this morning and everybody was up and ready to go. So we went. We left Monterey and flew north up the coast to San Francisco. Got alot of pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and the City. I will post those later today. We left San Francisco and flew to to get gas then set out for Aurora. We are taking a tour at 2:00. more after that.

May 10 Debrief

We started today without flying anywhere! We drove to an airport! Yes, we drove.

This was a small airport about 5 flying minutes from Chino and highly recommended for it's uniqueness and it's diner. Problem was there were 9 folks that wanted to go, so we piled into cars and drove there for lunch. Mike's brother Ron and Mike's buddy Tom, along with Joe and Lucille Nix drove us there. Once again we had a great time just visiting and walking the airport.

We made our way back to Chino and flew north for a final destination of Monterey. Mike's sister-in-law Kerry and her family live there and they met us at the airport and we went to dinner at a nice place down on Monterey Bay and then down the coast until the sun set.

Impressions: I was last in California in 1962 (50 years ago). I did not remember how cool it could be. We had to put our jackets on after dinner. Also, I did not realize how mountainous Southern California is. Most of what we flew over today for 2.5 hours was very mountainous and rugged terrain. Glad the airplanes worked perfectly.

Hope you enjoy the video. Turn on your speakers and turn the volume up.

Youtube Link

Darrell

May 9 Debrief

Well the 5th day of our adventure is in the books and it went exactly as planned. We left Boulder City and flew about an hour to Furnace Creek Airport in Death Valley(lowest airport in the US is checked off the list). We flew at a relatively low altitude and saw alot of desert and not much else. It was beautiful in it own way. We were somewhat surprised that it was a comfortable temperature when we got there and the was some civilization close by the airport. We took some pictures and left for Chino CA.

Mike took the lead and did all the radio work to talk to air traffic control to get us into a very busy airspace. He made it look easy. Thanks Mike, from all of the Skydogs. We landed at Chino as a flight of 3 and we met Barry who is a friend of Mike's brother Ron. He has a hanger and a few very nice airplanes at the airport. We were also joined by Joe and Lucille Nix who flew out from Georgia to meet us and enjoy the sights. It was good to see them. We enjoyed lunch and the air museum at the Chino Airport and then dinner. For dinner we were joined by one of Mike's high school buddies Steve Gibson. A good time was had by all. Thanks for sharing our experience.

Time seems to have warped for all of us. What day is today? When were we there? are questions that have  been asked many times. Seems the whole day revolves around the flight but it has been great and we all look forward to what the next day has in store.

Turn your speakers on and turn up the sound

YouTube link

Tomorrow's plan is to leave Chino and fly to Santa Paula. We hope to have Ron (Mike's brother) and friend Tom Barbre fly into Chino and then fly with us to Santa Paula for sightseeing and lunch. From Santa Paula we will fly to Montery for the night. Hope to see Mike's sister-in-law there.

Just to let you know, we have flown 19.5 hours so far which is about 3000 miles in 5 days.

Onward!
Darrell

May 8 Debrief

Dear Blogger readers,
Darrell said my spelling was so atrocious (big boy word) that I had to keep at it until I got it right. I said maybe tomorrow it will be better. So here we go.
We flew almost 4 hours again today and covered alot of beautiful territory. After flying to Page AZ for lotsa gas, we flew over Glen Canyon Dam then up Lake Powell for about 60 miles until we reached Monument Valley. It was our first sunny day and the weather was perfect. You old duffers may recognize the area from John Wayne westerns. The director John Ford picked a perfect place for those films. From Monument Valley, we turned back southwest to fly over the Grand Canyon, We had to fly at 10,500 MSL(mean sea level), which was about 4000 feet abover the rim, Even at that altitude you feel like you are just above the canyon. They say that it took approximately 17 million years( give or take a week) to be formed by the mighty Colorado River, That sort of puts a 30 year mortgage into perspective. Our overnight for this evening is Boulder City NV. After stowing our gear we drove the 1/2 mile to Hoover Dam, quite impressive. We just finished the $8.95 prime rib all you can eat buffet, which is almost obligtory in Vegas. During dinner all I could think of was cousin Eddie in National Lampoon's vacation.

Youtube Here

In the morning we plan to head towards Furnace Creek in Death Valley. Hopefully the winds won't be that bad. Much of the area we flew today was void of emergency landing areas (mountians, rocks, cliffs, etc) so we are grateful to Lycoming for making such a reliable engine. We also have to thanks Vans Aircraft for designing such a wonderful kit.

Harry just told me we have just hit 1603 hits on the blog, wow, we are humbled. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers, continue the journey with us.

Until tomorrow,

Skydad

May 8 Kayenta AZ to Boulder City NV

Good Morning! We had a long day yesterday and a late evening getting caught up with emails and the blog. We really slept well.

Today has a very exciting schedule. There are no services here at Kayenta so we will fly to Page to get fuel (about 30 minutes west of here).

First sight is Monument Valley in Southern Utah (take a look at the Monument valley pin in The Map. I put a couple links there to get familiar with that area. Should be very interesting)

Then we will fly west to position ourselves over the north rim of the Grand Canyon. We plan to cross the Grand Canyon thru a VFR corridor at the minimum altitude of 10,500 ft.

Flying west we will overfly Lake Meade and Hoover Dam and then to Boulder City for the night.

Side Note: We put links to all the video clips under each blogger viewer to Youtube because some of the ipads seemed to have troube viewing the clip from the blog. Sorry if you have had a problem but this seems to have fixed that.

Ya'll have a great day and thanks for following the trip.

Darrell

May 7 Debrief

Darrell is up to his ears in the editing room (hotel lobby) so I am filling in as the assistant Blogger.  If you like to correct other peoples spelling and grammer, you're gonna love this.   It's not hard to tell that we are like a bunch of little kids waiting for Santa, as we are waking up at 0 dark thirty (before the sun comes up).  After arriving at the airport we toured the Mid America Aviation Museum, then off to preflight the planes. It was still windy (20 to 30 mph winds) and overcast when we blasted off for New Mexico.  Even with the overcast, the scenery was magnificent.  We got a chance to use the XM weather (thank you John Early) a whole bunch, and couldn't have navigated the rainshowers and mountains without it.  Our fuel stop was Moriority NM (25 to 30 knot winds again), and then off to Shiprock.
Shiprock is located up near four Corners (see if you can name the four states that meet there).  A short trip across the desert took us to our destination of Kayenta, AZ which is part of the Navajo Nation.  Dinner at the Amigo Cafe was a fiesta to the palete ( it was really good) a must stop if you pass this way.

The plan tommorrooww (in the morning) is to find some gas, then fly over Monument valley, Lake Powell, the Grand Canyon, and land at Boulder, just south of Hoover Dam in Nevada.
The homemade planes have been running great and we can't wait to see what lies ahead.  We  flew for a total of 4 hours and 36 minutes today and covered a bunch of ground.

We are overwhelmed by your interest and support.  We are merely the torchbearers for anyone with dreams of adventure.  We love the comments and feel like there are  more than just   the five of us in the air.

Until tomorrow

Skydad

Click here for a youtube link

May 6 Video - sorry for the delay

Please see post from May 6 Debrief for details

Click here for a youtube version

May 7 - Liberal KS to Farmington NM

Since Salida/Leadville has rain/freezing temps/ low visibility until Wednesday, we have decided to skip that stop and do Leadville on the way back.

So today we will fly into New Mexico and get as far west as possible. We have spent an hour and a half at the table eating breakfast and flight planning on the tablet computers. We drank alot of coffee and on the way back to the hotel the skydogs had to make a pitstop.

Sorry Mom. Mike made me do it.

May 7 - Liberal KS to Salida Co...NOT

With light rain and temperatures in the low 40s at Salida, we are going to sit tight and watch for an improvement in the weather. We really want to get into Leadville CO (elevation 9523 ft) which is highest in the country and one of the goals of the trip so. We want to make that stop. We will watch patiently and try to keep this group out of any mischief. We probably should assign someone that duty.

May 6 - Debrief

Wow, what a day. Started out a prefect day in Russellville. Slept great last night and got a good breakfast at the hotel. The FBO lineman was there waiting on us at about 8:00 and we gased up and departed about 8:45. As we got further west, the head winds began to pick up until we were flying into winds of 25 mph. This made the going somewhat slow at about 130 mph ground speed. We finally stopped just outside Oklahoma City for fuel and some exercise.

We saw an interesting sight, in one field we saw dozens on wind mills generating electricity and the next field would be oil rigs pumping oil. Somehow I never thought I would see those two things together.

We checked the weather into Liberal and the cloud ceiling was down to 1800 ft above the ground and steady but the winds were out of the north at 30 mph gusting to 38! That is alot. We were very lucky that the wind was right down the runway so it worked out fine. We are in the hotel and getting settled for the night. The wireless connection is very slow so I will post the pictures and video later this evening.

To answer a few questions we got in comments. We fly at about 150-160 miles per hour and so far have covered around 400 mile a day. So far it has worked out to fly about 2 hours and land for fuel then finish up to the destination. We'll see how this approach holds up as we seem to be getting into some weather the next couple days. We need to stay flexible.

May 6 - Russellville AR to Liberal KS

Today we cross the western part of Arkansas, through the middle of Oklahoma and up to Liberal.Our projected course today takes us directly over Oklahoma City. For those pilots among us, we know this as the home of the FAA. We have discussed the possibility of doing a low pass  over the Administration Building just to say Hi! but have decided again it for now. Everyone have a great day, I am sure we will.

May 5 Debrief

Well we just had a perfect day of flying. The weather was beautiful after we got past some rain clouds in northern Alabama. Thanks to all who came out for the departure. That was amazing. Here is a short montage of pictures from the day.

The youtube link is here.

Cinco De Flyo

Here is a little introduction video of the initial take off and fly by at the airport this morning.  For a larger version of this video click here.

May 5 - Cleveland GA to Russellville AR

Weather is part cloudy with 30% chance of thunderstorm in north Georgia and partly cloudy and nice in Arkansas. Stop in Bolivar TN for fuel. Should be in Russellville about 1:00 CST. The big sight today will be the Mississippi River. We will try to get some good pictures at a low alitude. See you the evening.

Ready To Go

We have checked the airplnes, the weather, we are packed and ready to go.
The plan is to be at the hanger at 8:00 in the morning and depart at 9:00. We have mounted a video camera on the left wing of our airplane and we gave the camera a spin (no pun intended) yesterday afternoon. This will be one of the methods we will use to record the places we visit. I am working on my expertise with the video editor and I will get better. Enjoy.

Some Suggestions

So we have had a few suggestions about the blog title from some of our family members. I share them with you now as a way to more or less communicate their true feelings about this endeavor.

Headline: Come Fly With Us!
Tagline: All the adventure, none of the barf bags

Headline: Sky Dogs West
Tagline: 5 guys. 3 planes.  What could possibly go wrong? 

Headline:  Sky Dogs West
Tagline: 5 guys. 3 planes. 21 days.  Our wives are thrilled. 

We will take any and all suggestions...

Three days to blast off, weather looks great and we are planning to leave at 9:00 on Saturday. Here is a shot of the runway looking north at our home airport Mountain Airpark (0GE5).

Harry the Hound

Harry the Hounds RV4

This is Harry in his RV4 as he patrols north Georgia.  Ever vigilant to possible unknown dangers i.e.
ultralights, birds, birthday ballons, etc.  Harry is a retired Delta Airlines Captain and a former Navy aviator. 

Three Airplanes and Five Guys

The airplanes for our trip are kit built airplanes. Two were built by the pilots and one was purchased from it's builder. All three airplanes have 2 seats and very similar performance and carrying capacity. Here is one of the 2 RV-6  airplanes. The third is a RV-4. We will have more pictures of the other planes and pilots as Saturday approaches.

This airplane is 642MD and was built by Mike Stewart and  Darrell Skogman. We will share the pilot duties for the trip. You can check the link on the top right to learn more about the Vans Aircraft kits.

Cinco de Mayo/Flyo - Anti Flyo (before the Flyo)

Before any adventure of this nature begins a certain amount of planning is involved.  While not all  situations can be known, it is best to put the odds in ones favor through diligent, serious flight planning.

Flight Planning