Yakima is a particularly fun airport to fly into. You just line up on Mount Rainier and descend right on course. The other runway lines up perfectly with Mount Hood. I completed my first airplane mission at Yakima. I had to pick up a new compass from Cub Crafters for our Super Cub. We had a wonderful tour of Cub Crafters and for anyone interested in a light sport airplane that is a blast to fly - check them out.

In the meantime it is nice to soar over them safely and enjoy the diverse shapes all across the state. It is amazing to think about the amount of water that it took to carve all those valleys.

The winding rivers and rolling hills are so much fun to fly over. I can't wait till we begin our low mountain flying training where we get to dip down between the hills and learn a little something about mountain wave turbulence and really begin to navigate.

Here is one such scenic moment of Mount Hood on my way back toward Washington.

Here is my desk. I try to keep it pretty clean. Hopefully all of you pilots will appreciate the harmonious indications on those instruments :). For further analysis of this flight to Redmond, Oregon I am including a Google Earth model of the flight as recorded by my little Garmin e-trex. If that last sentence made little sense, fear not and enjoy the pictures. The flight was 675 miles and took me about 6 hours to fly. To drive the same route would have taken 18 hours and would not have been nearly as scenic.

It has been only recently that I have begun to appreciate the amount of airplanes over our heads each day. You can see from this picture all the contrails made from the jets traversing the country. The dark line out in front of me is actually just a shadow from the contrails made through haze. I took this a little southwest of Pullman coming up on the Snake River.

This past month has involved many hours of flying. The nice thing about the time change is that we don't have to wake up quite as early to be airborn at sunrise. This is a view out my office just a few minutes after takeoff. It was a wonderful day to be out flying on my own.

Here is another picture of the park

This is a park Leslie and I enjoy visiting often for long walks and duck feeding. This same weekend we attended our first marriage conference with Family Life. We had a very encouraging time and recommend it highly.

Fall has arrived. This is a picture of Downtown Spokane and our neighborhood. I took it on my way back to Felts after a long cross-country flight to Redmond Oregon. The colors here have been very beautiful this autumn.

Back flying

It has been a really good two weeks

We made it home just in time to celebrate my Dad's birthday with a trip to the Puyallup fair.

Here is my beautiful wife taking in the sun as we paddled around the island a little before sunset.

This is me trying not to drop my fishing pole, not tip in the canoe and hang on to my giant northern pike all at the same time. Yeah for supper.