My plan was to fly to Fort Parker, spend the night, then fly to Mesquite to meet with Bo on Saturday morning. Bo was having none of that, he was going to join me at Fort Parker!
Friday morning I was at my hangar packing, watching storms to the North, but soon launched to the NorthEast to get around them. My plan was simply to fly. Just go with no certain plan, but to eventually make it to Mesquite to meet up with Bo, then fly to Fort Parker.
I flew by Fort Parker at about 3,000 feet and kept going. I looked at a couple of airports, and Ennis looked like a cool option as it's on a small lake, but I figured I'd head on to find some food. I ended up in Lancaster where they have a nice little diner. After eating my chicken fried steak and tots, I loaded up and hopped over to Mesquite. Soon Bo was there. We relaxed in his hangar for awhile, then we were on our way to Fort Parker.
Fort Parker is one of our favorites. Even without a fly-in event, I called to see if we could come out and the airfield manager said to head that way! Jed Keck is the owner of the field and he has a great place. He travels a lot as he's a super secret helicopter pilot spy or something, so Darius Farmer manages the place for him and Jed couldn't have picked a better guy for the job! We always feel welcome.
After a night of drinking plenty of beer and catching up, we got up early and headed back to Mesquite for fuel. Bo wanted to take me to Cedar Mills for lunch. Wow, what a cool strip. You fly over the lake to land, and the runway begins at the water's edge! Pretty cool and I can see taking a lot of photos there in the future. If you have an engine failure on takeoff, well, you'd better know how to swim! This is an airport that is on my list for some future visits! After we landed, a very cool Cessna 182 (yeah I said it), two more 140s and a Luscombe dropped in. The 182 was painted like a 57 Chevy complete with fin!
After filling our bellies and checking out all of the other planes, we took off and headed back to Mesquite. Our friend Dean who is also based there came out and I got to check out his RV. He was able to fit it under the wing of his Luscombe, so he's got a plane for two different types of missions! I finally had to admit it was time to go home. It was hot, so I climbed to 7500 where it was 50 degrees and I got a groundspeed of almost 130 mph! That made for a pretty quick ride home.
I'm now refreshed, ready to go back to work, but looking forward to the next adventure! Thanks Bo, I needed that more than you know!
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