Dichroic Reflections

back from Santa Barbara

Wow. Santa Barbara is a very nice town, and he weather there was wonderful - nice and cool, with a sea breeze. Flying there went smoothly; we left here around stopped at Blythe to refuel, early enough that it was only hot, not blazingly hot. We got to Santa Barbara around 1:30. Rudder found us with no problem, and took us (and and my instructor, henceforth referred to as CFII since that's what he is - certified Flight Instructor, Instrument) to the Elephant Bar for lunch, and then down the main street so I could get a look at the town. The company Rudder went there to meet with had put him into an extremely nice hotel; we had a little suite with wood floors and a wrought iron bed and we'd booked a room for CFII. After checking him in and dropping our stuff, we all went for a long walk down the beach. I waded; I don't know how anyone can stand keeping their feet dry on a beach in summer, but Rudder and CFII did. We watched surfers and boogie boarders, but didn't get to see any kite surfers. The water is still cold enough that all of the surfers were wearing wetsuits, though other people were swimming in bathing suits. After that we walked out on a long pier and had dinner at a casuall place with a second floor deck. The food was all right, but I was very cold, not having brought a pullover. I didn't want to get too late a start in the morning and we were all tired from walking in the sand and from the salt air, so we walked back to the hotel and all went to sleep early. In the morning, we met for breakfast, headed to the airport, filed a flight plan and CFII and I headed back.

I think we probably left around 8:30 or so; we were expecting to get back here around 1. Rudder was on a commercial flight leaving around noon; he kept telling me he'd be back home "just a little after us". By the time we approached the airport, landed, taxiied, got all our stuff out, tied down the airplane, put the sunshades in its windows, noted down the Hobbs and Tach times, and I paid and drove home, it was about 2. It's 4:30 now, and Rudder's not here. There is this nice thing about general aviation airplanes: if the weather is acceptable at the departuer and destination airports and along the way, and neither the airplane nor pilot have anything much wrong with them, you can just go. I checked the airline web page and it looks like Rudder's plane was delayed for a couple of hours, presumably due to weather and some other airport entirely. Ha.

(Of course, it cou dhave been something wrong with the plane, which could just as easily have happened to mine, but still. Ha.)

Flying home wasn't quite as much fun. I was tired; Blythe was blazingly hot when we stopped for fuel, and we got some turbulence over the desert. Also, the whole last forty-five minutes was fairly miserable, as we descended into the blast furnace that s Phoenix in summer. The frst thing I did when I got home was to strip off my clothing and jump in the pool. For reasons I don't fully understand, my ponytail is still wet, two hours later (this is rare, in a desert) but no complaints about that.