2006 Oshkosh Trip - Day 2

Date: July 23, 2006

We woke at 7 AM, headed over to Carl's Jr. to get some breakfast (I don't understand the location of the apostrophe - why isn't it "Carl Jr.'s"? Does Carl own a Jr.? It's not Carl's Jr. restaurant? Anyway, we then headed over to the airport, parked Lee's car at the hangar, loaded up the plane, and taxied over to the FBO to drop off the key to Lee's hangar and hit the can for one last time. This leg, unlike the last one, had ONE waypoint - Ripon, WI - gateway to OSH.

We took off and climbed to 7500 ft. I let Danny Norris fly, both with and without the Navaid autopilot - no problems. After a while, we contacted Joe Hull, who had left Cheyenne, WY about 20 minutes before us, on 122.75. He said he was at 9500 ft. with a bit of a tailwind, so we climbed up to 9500 ft. No difference in groundspeed. Oh, well - we stayed there anyway. We got flight following, but never got any traffic calls.

I have to say, after the views of the day before, watching ranchland and corn go by under us for 4.5 hours was (not to insult our friends in the center of the country) somewhat boring. The air was clear and calm - no turbulence, with 40 mile visibility, but there just isn't much to look at over eastern Colorado, Nebraska, and Iowa. We descended to 7500 ft. over central Iowa and picked up about 6 kts. more tailwind. By the time we reached the Wisconsin border, the tailwind was 10 kts., and there were scattered clouds at 5000 ft - 8000 ft., so we had to weave a bit to miss some of the taller ones. That was fun, and clouds are always cool to look at.

About 40 miles out of Ripon, we picked up the OSH ATIS and began a descent to 2300 ft., coming down through the scattered layer. We were keeping our eyes peeled for traffic, but we really didn't see anything until arriving at Ripon, and what we did see was all below us on the 1800 ft. path at 90 kts. We were doing 135 kts. at 2300 ft., with no-one at our altitude. We followed the tracks to Fisk, waggled the wings for the controller, and made a right turn onto a left base for 36. They shifted us over to 36R, which was good because there was no one on it and I could land long and go all the way to the end.

We turned onto the taxiway, held up the "HBC" sign, and were guided to the Homebuilt Camping Area. After a bit of negotiation with the parking folks, we moved the plane over to a tight spot that Curt Smith had been saving for me for a few hours. After a bit of juggling, we figured out how to get the plane and tent into one spot (Curt's tent, and my new one, are large enough for Princess Diana's wedding to be held in, so getting space for them was non-trivial), and I had to ensure that I couldn't take out Curt's other winglet with this one, too.

We got some food/drink, caught up with Curt, and then eventually found a bunch of other COZY folks back at the planes (Frank Johansen, Dave Domeier [ex-COZY, nee RV], Curt Smith, Bill Kastenholz, Tim Lummp, Danny, Kevin, and I) and went to the "beer tent" to get some dinner.

Afterwords, we headed back to the planes and turned in for the night.

Another 4.5 hours in the air, and we're 2/3 of the way across the country (well, 60%, anyway).

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