In the non-fantasy realm, I had a pleasant hour of touring around
the valley in the trike on Sunday evening. Fairly smooth but some
thermals still kicking off even as late as 8pm when I launched. I
did a lap around the pattern for practice, then headed east to
Workman, Mulino, across to Skydive, to Beck's then back to Lenhardt.
At Mulino I found a Beechcraft Bonanza on the taxiway, being drained
of fuel. Seems they don't work so well when you forget to put the
wheels down. Messes up the props too. Oops. Looks like it slid to
a stop fairly gently, but that's gonna leave a mark on a hundred grand.
I ran into an interesting patch of fairly strong turbulence just west
of Skydive Oregon, on the west side of Molalla. Nothing there which
would seem to trigger it, and the upper level winds weren't anything
too extreme...about 10mph out of the north, typical for summer. But
it was a rock-n-roll ride down to land at Beck's, though calm near
the surface. Departing to the east, I found the same thing again for
a bit, but it was confined to just that area and things got smooth
again farther west as I approached Lenhardt. As I was halfway down the
downwind leg, an RV-8 called three miles out approaching from the
south. I told him to come on through because I'm slow. It was less
than a minute until he was on short final, and he was at his hangar
and out of the plane by the time I finally got on the ground. Ah,
the virtues of a low-and-slow 40mph airplane.... :-)
MGF
