This trip hung in the balance until just a week before departure. My partner Dan and I had been planning it for months, drawing flight legs on the big (too big, really) map of the United States on our dining room table. Super excited and confident after flying from Marin County CA to Oshkosh WI last summer, we told friends we’d finally fly all the way to the East Coast (Charlottesville VA, Lewes DE and St Simmons Island GA) and also visit friends and family in Nashville TN, Longmont CO and Moab UT.

AND for maximum safety, we decided to fix one of the only issues we see with the design of the awesome Cessna R182: the dual magneto has a single point of failure (so much for dual). We tried to have a dual electronic ignition system installed. That’s a story for another day, but it was a dismal failure, and our plane was out of commission for nearly two months. Talk about a bummer, when it had finally stopped raining in April – and we had no $100 hamburger machine.

We got our Sierra girl back April 27, original magnetos restored and she’s humming beautifully. So departure is set for May 4. We chose May because good weather and not too hot, and MAYBE fewer thunderstorms (we’ll see). We’re now 1. changing our oil and 2. packing.

I’ll be writing about the small airports we’ve been researching and marking on the map, and what I learn aviation-wise. I’m a 250-hour pilot with SEL, SES, high performance and complex endorsements; basically green as can be but very keen to learn. Dan, on the other hand, has 27,000 (yep really) hours flying everything from Supercubs to the Boeing 777.

For now, back to loading routes into Foreflight.