Rose early and attacked the skies at dawn. Sounds great, doesn't it? There's an aviation saying that goes: "Time to spare, go by air". So our attack really got started around 8 am. Delays included waiting for the airport personnel to open up the airport at 7am, refueling, getting the credit card charges figured out (this is higher math in Yankton, SD).
The morning was perfect. The air was calm, the skies were clear, and the temperature was cool. The only trouble was that we were flying directly into the rising sun. This is not a good thing. Makes seeing stuff kinda difficult. This is where you just gotta relax and have faith in the "big sky" philosophy. We left Yankton and headed directly east to someplace I can't even remember right now (I know it was in Iowa), but it was about 165 miles away, and we landed in an easy crosswind at 13 knots. Took the courtesy pickup truck (that's all that people really drive around here) into town for breakfast and took off again toward Illinois.
It was cold this morning, but now it really got cold. We flew under a heavy overcast which kept our altitude less than 2000 feet. Now hereabouts radio towers go to as much as 2500 feet above ground level, so we really gotta keep an eye out for these things. They are very unforgiving when struck. Our M.O. is for Art and I to call over the radio whenever we see a radio tower, or high tension lines, or phone poles (depending how low we happen to be flying at the moment). This helps, but it is amazing how well these things hide.
The farms of Iowa and Illinois have recently been plowed, and the entire landscape is a light brown patchwork set off by the typical 640 acre sections and the roads around them. Inside each field there is a random design of unplowed drainage strips which give the entire scene a most artistic feel. I wonder how many of these farmers have ever seen their handiwork from the air. It is just magical.
We had a great tailwind again today, and nowhere near as turbulent as the days before. This meant that flying low over this pool-table-flat countryside was good fun. Many times I could see farmers driving down the road across my path, and stopping to watch my biplane come hurtling toward him in his pickup truck. It was easy to think of myself in a P51 Mustang strafing enemy tanks in a battle to save civilization as we know it. It was probably easy for the farmer to think of me as some damn fool. But some things you just gotta do. Puckata, puckata, puckata goes the mind of Walter Mitty.
We got to wherever we are right now in Illinois (about 100 miles west of Chicago) just as the ceiling started to descend. Chicago was raining and unflyable. So here we sit waiting for the clear skies behind us to catch up to us in their relentless eastward march across America. Wherever we are right now, the people are friendly. The airport manager even offered us some leftover pork chop sandwiches, and called the owner of the local weekly paper to come out and do a story on a couple of biplane pilots who are flying around the country. Just missed the deadline for the latest issue, so maybe next week we'll be famous in a place I don't even know the name of.
Aye, the life of a wandering biplane pilot is a lonely one.
Tomorrow the clear skies should have caught up to us, and we will go for a short hop around Chicago, and up into Lansing Michigan, home of the Waco biplane factory, for an oil change, wash job, and miscellaneous other stuff that people have to do to their airplanes.