There is now an updated version of this guide. I’ve only done it twice, so I imagine that I will make alterations to this guide after we have done it as a family. Both times I was with people with a high tolerance for discomfort, which helps with this sort of adventurous travel. Keeping that in...

I’ve been a good customer of many businesses across the country, a lot of them situated on airfields. I use a website called AirNav to look up airfields before I land there. It will tell me if the food is edible, the fuel is cheap, and the people friendly. FBO (I’ve started a glossary!) stands for...

Traveling across the continent in the plane for the first time was not something I took lightly. I read a lot, studied the charts a lot, and talked to a lot of other pilots. After much consultation, this is what I packed into the plane (before we then loaded it with our luggage). As usual, click on...

Returning west, we were often dodging through the clouds. We flew at ten thousand feet or so, and descending to an airport seven thousand feet below took fifteen to twenty minutes. At least, that was a comfortable rate. We could also just push the noise over and scream down, but then we would be...

Here is an important lesson. After my flight from the Canadian border to the eastern tip of Long Island, I was wiped out. I parked in the pitch black at night on an unfamiliar ramp. I did my usual parking job, carefully on the painted T and with the pair of the little red metal chocks under the...

Back on August 17, after our visit to the Diamond factory and our traditional return-to-civilization meal at the CN Tower, the boys and I crossed into the United States, cleared customs at the Buffalo airport and headed toward the eastern tip of Long Island, trying to make it to their cousin...

I’m not an environmental nut. I have a friend who says that the Green movement is just a substitute for religion, which scares me because it appears to be so true. There are some who proselytize, but most seem to use their Green belief to atone for the sins of the populace at large, as if a two...

Some of the blog isn't going to be in the order it happened. Darn. It was a long trip across the country to the east coast, and even though it was exciting and exhilarating, I was exhausted by the time I flew the last two hours twenty minutes solo from Maryland up to my sister’s place in Rhode...

BDR – AVP Bob Whitehead, my business partner, decided that he’d rather brave the little plane than the cattle car of SouthWest to get back to Santa Monica. Nell convinced me that the smart thing to do was to fly up to Bob’s place in Pennsylvania the night before (the plane was at Bridgeport, CT...

I’ve written before about my anxiety concerning the engine that powers our plane. It’s a very simple internal combustion engine, but because the technology is so old, I am responsible for settings that are totally automatic in my Toyota. I open the throttle (allow air to mix with the fuel), adjust...