Forty-one hours on the Hobbs timer and we have returned from our Spring Break trip to Washington, DC. It is a little difficult to write up, since there were four blogging authors along this time. There is a page summarizing the entries for the trip, so you can see what Rudy and Dexter wrote. That page also has links to the plan for the trip and rules in the plane. Nell took a lot of the photographs and they are captioned mostly with her comments. I will try to stick to the flying portion of the story, since I like to think that’s what my readers are coming to the site for. This page collects my write-ups of each day of flying.

We continue to learn more about these sort of trips and my hope is that before the boys are too old enough to want to come with us, we will have it down to a smoothly-running operation. Last summer when we flew across we tried a few times to make reservations at hotels ahead of our arrival. That was a mistake. A tornado kept us from reaching Chicago and the hotel still wanted to charge us for the room. Now Nell books the hotel from the FBO’s WiFi connection while I am getting the luggage out of the plane.

We realized on this trip that by the time we turn around to fly West we just want to get home. So we probably shouldn’t plan any major sightseeing, except possibly from the plane. Even going east we are good at pressing on to make it to the next town, but that put sometimes put us into our destinations at 5pm or later, which makes it hard to get to see much. So we need to fly a little each day and either be content with just three hours of flight time a day, or stay two nights in a place we feel is intriguing enough for a longer visit.

We packed light. This time we may have gotten it exactly right. I don’t think we arrived home with anything we didn’t wear at least once and we didn’t need to buy anything while we were traveling. We did borrow some rain gear in New York. But that’s getting ahead of things. It was cloudy on the morning we took off…

• Monday, March 30: Santa Monica, CA to Marfa, TX
• Tuesday, March 31: Marfa, TX to New Orleans, LA
• Wednesday, April 1: New Orleans, LA to Charlotte, NC
• Thursday, April 2: Charlotte, NC to Washington, DC
• Saturday, April 4: Washington, DC to New York, NY

Returning West:

• Wednesday, April 8: New York, NY to St. Louis, MO
• Friday, April 10: St. Louis, MO to Phoenix, AZ
• Saturday, April 11: Phoenix, AZ to Santa Monica, CA