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Summer Trip 2017 Part 1

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WebRuss

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Our summer trip this year was overly ambitious and had to be scaled back to reasonable. Once we figured out what we could do versus what we wanted to do, we came up with a pretty good route.
Entire-2017-trip.png

We will first head to Forth Worth Texas and visit some friends and see the sights like tourists. Then it will be on to Grey Bull Wyoming to visit more friends at a dude ranch. Then over to Rapid City South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and the Devil's Tower. Then of to St Paul Minnesota to do a brewery tour and walk the river walk. Then a short stop at OSH, of course, and then we turn south, past the Chicago skyline, down to Crossville TN to visit family. From there a short hop over to Pidgeon Forge to play tourist. Ambitious but not impossible.
Distance: 3605 nm
Time: 29 hours
Fuel: 292 gallons


The first leg of the trip took us from Ocala, KOCF to 23M Clarke County for a fuel stop, and finally to KGPM Grand Prarie
summer-trip-day1-route-.png


We had to fly higher and a bit more north that planned as many thunderstorms popped up along the way.
Ocala-to-Grand-Prarie.png


The clouds looked like cypress knees. A bunch of cumulus towers two to three thousand feet tall and slowly climbing. My wife did a short time lapse of the flying as we cloud surfed.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoZkQIqd67M[/ame]


I highly recommend 23M Clarke County airport as a fuel stop. Nice folks and very reasonably priced 100LL and 93 mogas. Here is a link to their facebook page

We climbed up to 10,500 for the leg from Clarke County to Grand Prairie to get above all the little towers of cumulus clouds. The Comanche really hums along happy at that altitude. I was able to lean it out well and burn about 8.5gph at about 130kts

We landed at Grand Prairie about 3pm local time and got our rental car and headed downtown. We decided to try something new and used airbnb.com and got a great little studio apartment right in the heart of downtown Fort Worth just off main street.

We walked around downtown for a while and then over to Risckys BBQ and had a great dinner and drinks. One of the local favorites is a local brewery just south of Forth Worth called Revolver Brewing. They have excellent brews. I highly recommend them.

maint-street-fort-worth.jpg


End of day 1. Stay tuned for part 2
 
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