Back to sunny San Diego

We left Palm Springs this morning and flew down to San Diego where we learned how to fly. We had a few problems with the handler in Palm Springs, they never refuelled the plane and we had to wait for the refueller and then they tried charging Matt a $27 handling fee!!! What handling??? There was nobody there to meet us from our plane when we arrived, they never refuelled like we asked them and they basically did bugger all. Anyway, since we uplifted fuel there (quite pricey I might add) they waived the handling fee.

As I was preflighting the plane I saw three F-18's coming in to the ramp near where we had parked. SWEET!!!

I was doing the flying today and took off and was told to fly a heading to the North and then we were cleared to resume own navigation to Gillespie. On the way out though the ATC controller was having a REALLY bad day. He was giving out to the other pilots because either they read back everything incorrectly, didn't know where they were or spoke really bad English or had bad radio's. It reminded me of the grumpy controller back at Gillespie in San Diego.

We didn't need to plot this route at all as it's quite close to Thermal airport which both Matt and I flew into on our long cross country. We were pretty much flying the route by memory and I tuned int he Julian VOR (navigation beacon) and followed it up the Borrego Valley and then the reverse bearing to the top of El Capitan reservoir and then towards Gillespie airport. The air was really really smooth so I flew her by hand the entire way leaving the autopilot off and just trimming for the altitude and checking the headings on the VOR beacon. It was a really nice flight.

Coming in to approach we could hear from the radios that Gillespie was as busy as ever. We were positioned behind traffic and then cleared to land on runway 27R. It's a nice long runway, but my landing was spot on and right on the numbers, and before we knew it were were parked up alongside the cafe for a nostalgic burger and fries. We then met my friends John and Janis (who are kindly putting us up for a couple of nights) and we did some catching up. I also gave my old instructor Kevin a call to let him know where we were at and he dropped by to say hello. We're planning to go out for some beers later tonight.

We parked the plane then in John and Janis' new hanger and then headed off to their hot tub and pool and just relaxed again in the sun. Tomorrow the plan is to do some air to air flying and take some nice shots of each other from the air. Looking forward to it.