Flight turned out to be exactly 3 hours, 275 nautical miles, and 13 landings!
What the map doesn’t show is that we flew right through 2 really busy airspaces. Right in the middle there, just below the lower green line, is DFW. We went right over it! And just to the right of that you can see Love Field too. First time I’ve had commercial airliners flying under me!
Can’t really get good pictures from a cell phone, but I couldn’t not take one or two at least.
Love Field hiding in the dark shadow just right of the tall DFW buildings.
You can only really tell its downtown by looking for the blue and green building lights right about center.
Just ahead of us is the DFW Airport!
Each one of those little islands of light in the dark are 2 DFW terminals, with a freeway running left-right between them.
Probably the biggest lesson of my first cross-country night flight is that airports are hard to see from the side! Thank goodness for GPS.
We flew down to Terrell and did a stop-and-go, and then flew right across DFW to Alliance and did more landings there. Their runway is huge, and also very well lit, which made it pretty easy. When a flock of 767s showed up we went out to Decatur and did a few more there on a not-large and not-well-lit runway for quite a different experience. Then came home and did a few more at Denton to get ourselves to 3 hours. 9:11PM to 12:11AM!
Was definitely a good first experience with night flying. Looking forward to when we do more night flying for the instrument-flying training!
Got a couple of videos and pictures of my first solo from my instructor.
He’s done this a number of times before, but I imagine at least the first few times you send a student off on their own it must be a little nerve wracking to watch.
Here are the videos of me taking off and then coming back! We have two runways at Denton and the larger closer one is closed for re-paving this month, so I’m off on the smaller one in the distance. Don’t worry, I’m well clear of all those dirt piles and construction trucks. 🙂
And off into the sky I go!Silky smooth landing…
There’s a tradition in aviation of cutting off a student’s shirt tails after their first solo. Back in “the day” most training aircraft had seats front-and-back rather than side-by-side, and the student sat in front. The instructor would tug on the student’s shirt tails to get their attention so they could give them instructions via hand signal. Cutting off the student’s shirt tail became a tradition that meant that the student was ready to fly on their own without the instructor tugging on them all the time.
Considering how much more I’ve learned just in the few days since then, I’m not sure that tradition wasn’t a bit premature! 😀
Bye bye shirt tails! N2112G is now officially my favorite plane to fly. It was a beautiful night to fly. 100% would do again, if you can’t tell by my grin.
And on top of all that it was instructor Nathan’s birthday! So we sent him off to have a birthday dinner and I helped one of other instructors push all the planes back in, all with my back hangin’ out since I left my other shirt in the car. 😀
And what did I do next? Went to see a movie with my buddy Bradley, who is learning to fly at a different school and had a big test the next morning. We needed a brain break, and Deadpool & Wolverine provided it!
The shirt I picked was one that I had brought home from my recent trip to Seattle to help clean out my grandfather’s apartment after he passed. The colors remind me of him, and I figured if I’m going to have parts of a shirt framed and hanging on my wall I might as well have two memories out of it! Grandpa spent almost his entire career working at Boeing and worked in different areas on various planes. I brought home most every memento that he had collected. The day before my solo, on my way out for that day’s flight I stopped and got the mail and got some items Mom had found and sent me. I had tossed them into my flight bag, and forgot to take them out. So these items went with me on my solo, as well as my next solo the next morning!
Grandpa had a collection of these sorts of things, presumably from events he went to. Other than the 777, I don’t actually know if he was involved in these specific programs or if he just went to the events, or maybe just bought them in the gift shop, I really don’t know! I picked a couple to show here because they’re from the year I was born, which seemed cool. 100th 767 on July 24th 1984, the 600th 747 on July 27th 1984, and the rollout of the first 737-300 January 17 1984, as well as a 777 pin, which was a program I know he worked on.
In other flying news, yesterday I flew to Ardmore Oklahoma and back, which is about 45 minutes one-way. We’re in the phase of training where we’re learning about how to plan and execute long cross-country trips. Pretty fun, and plenty more to learn!
So last night was my first time flying a plane all by myself! That flight is one where you just take off, go around, land again, and do that twice more.
And lucky enough for me the plane was available again this morning early, so after a couple hours of sleep and pushing it back out of the hanger, I’m off again!
This aircraft seems to be missing something…
Seems weird not to have someone sitting in the right seat! Plane actually feels pretty roomy this way!
Gonna make some circles
So for my first flight away from the airport by myself I’m just flying over the nearby lake Ray Roberts and the rural area on the north side. Just going to do some practice maneuvers, try and draw some shapes in the sky! Before I start though I needed to snap a picture. It’d be way to easy to just cruise and enjoy the view, but I gotta practice!
Cruising back to the airport
Winds were a little weird today, so my circles were not a great success. Had some other traffic as well which forced me to abort a few of them. Good practice though, and tons of fun.
Really crappy circles. S-turn was good though.
Next up, on Friday, is a cross-country trip up north to Ardmore and back.
I haven’t posted about this yet because so far it’s absolutely boring going around in circles and no time to take pictures. Some statistics though:
I now have 34.4 hours of time flying over 23 flights. Minus the 1.7 today and the 0.9 yesterday means I had my first solo at 31.8 hours, after 22 flights with instructors.
I have now landed a plane 114 times. It took about a hundred before I was consistently okay.
I have flown 5 different aircraft across 3 different types.
I’ve flown with two different instructors, split about evenly between them.
I don’t have mileage count, that’s not something that really gets tracked. For reference though today’s flight was about 150 miles. I’m probably at about 2500-3000 miles flown, never getting more than 50mi from the airport.
Now I’m stuck to the ground until Friday morning, which means it’s time to get back to studying the books! So much yet to memorize.
Disneyland Day 2, and the Spring Break fever is in full effect! Today we start with early-opening hours, and (spoiler alert) we go all the way until tomorrow!
We used our early-access time to get to the rides that we can’t “lightning lane” later, to get them while the line is short. The fun part about this is that these are three of the oldest rides: Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Mr. Toad’s wild ride. We did Mr. Toad first. If you’re going to get sentenced to hell for theft you might as well get it out of the way early in the day. (Boy, Disney morality tales used to be dark! Yes, this is literally the plot of the ride.)
The least crowded we will see Main Street today…Emily is meeting Mr. Toad for the first timeThat’s right, we’re going to never-never land!
It’s actually pretty fun to do the old rides. They’ve definitely done some minor modernization to these, but for the most part they’re still very old-school original Disney. Personally I love that. Imagining what riding something like “Small World” was like when it was the height of technological entertainment is fascinating. And I love the way they had to be clever with things like mirrors to create effects, rather than the modern rides that just use projections and hidden TV screens.
In a similar vein, we also went on the old “20,000 Leagues under the sea” submarine ride, now with a Finding Nemo overlay over it instead.
A submarine with a spiral staircase? How wonderfully decadent!It may not be real coral, but it pretty!Bubbles!Submarines and Monorails, truly tomorrowland is the future!
I remember being so fascinated by this ride when I was a kid, even without the Nemo and friends aspects! The illusion of diving under the ocean was so fascinating! There was another party with a 5-ish year old in the same ride vehicle with us, and the kid’s surprised exclamations, as well as slight terror at one point, really made me smile.
Walking past the Matterhorn. It is both pretty, and the screaming pleases me.The queue for Runaway Railway is fun, lots of random big props to look at.Bevin is about to do regrettable things to a cinnamon role.
After our morning snack it’s time for a whirlwind through some more rides! Lightning Lane to the rescue, so we don’t have to stand in lines for too long!
Yes, we’re doing Pirates again. Yarr!Trivia fact: Above the captain, that’s a real human skull. Because back in the day that’s how you did it.I identify with this pirate, beset by cats and taking up drinking to cope?Star Tours time!It wouldn’t be a Tiki Room without dole whip.In the tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-room…Apparently space mountain is no longer exciting to Julian?
Yes, we’re wearing sunglasses on space mountain. What of it?
Actually it was a test. I had decided I disliked how bright this version of space mountain is, due to the cool star-projector effect. Matt suggested sunglasses might dim it down enough that you get more of the “AHH, WHERE IS THIS COASTER TAKING US?!” feeling.
He was definitely right, however we decided that it dims down the colors too much, and the stars effect is too nice to cover up. Next time: no sunglasses.
Julian has heard from the internet that buying the cheesy pretzel roll from the snack shop by Matterhorn, and then going to Adventure Land to buy meat skewers and putting them on the pretzel roll is quite good. Can confirm: was tasty. Worth another back-and-forth all the way across the park.
The Roll in QuestionBeards required cleaning after this.Spinal realignment back in the room.
After lunch it was time for our mid-day break. Spring-break crowds are in full force right now and the park is a bit crowded, plus apparently we’re all old and infirm.
After a bit of a rest we head back to the park via the monorail!
Monorail!Entry gate looks empty…Park is definitely not! Small World!TomorrowlandBaby monorail!
The Disneyland monorail is much smaller than the World version. Both the monorail network, and the physical cars themselves. But it offers some fun views of the park, and it’s better than walking back!
Time to do Small World, because, well, you have to? You can’t SKIP Small World!
It’s interesting that this version has both more Disney IP (Lion King and Nemo characters, Snow White, Aladdin, etc…) and possible better audio.
The facade is more fun than the World versionThis version has more IP.Caught by a parade on our way to the Matterhorn.We’re off to see the Yeti
Spinal re-alignment is once again necessary, so we’ll ride the matterhorn! Dune has been the topic of humor for us lately, so Matt screaming “THE SLEEPER HAS AWAKENED!” as we go through the cave after the Yeti was pretty damn funny.
Time to leave Switzerland and head off-planet for more Star Wars adventure! Rise of the Resistance is an amazing ride. You start out walking through a cave complex, and then you board a spaceship to escape!
Into the caves of the resistance base we go!Boarding our shuttle to the secret resistance hideout.On the ship
After you get on the shuttle, it takes off for your adventure… And then you get back OFF the shuttle as a prisoner!
In the shuttle bayOur poor shuttle, what will we do now?!Waiting to be interrogated…I volunteered to tell the guard everything I knew, they weren’t impressed.Imperial AT-AT walker, look out!
It’s such a fun ride. The entire Star Wars land is themed so well. The only thing they couldn’t theme properly is the fact that in the “real” place there should be two suns overhead. Someday they’ll figure that one out too I’m sure.
Off to pilot the Millennium Falcon!
The Dusk FalconThe life-sized Falcon looks really cool at night.More FalconLet’s play space-chess!Which button lets the Wookie win?Our former pilots, now demoted for crashing into everything.Bevin is way too happy, considering that’s a bad-guy ship…It’s so pretty in this land at night.
Next up, more food, before we have food.
Bevin demanded Beignets…
What you really need after a bunch of sugar is a roller coaster! Fortunately for us Big Thunder Mountain is right there!
And here we gooooLook out for the dynamite goat!We escaped with our lives! Barely!It’s also a very pretty ride at night
We made the choice to keep our reservation and go back to Oga’s Cantina for some drinks rather than watch the fireworks, and decided to make a quick detour to the Storybook Land ride. It’s a simple outdoor boat ride through miniatures of a bunch of the Disney stories. Basically: Baby’s First Jungle Cruise.
What we DIDN’T know was that if you’re on the boat when the fireworks start, they stop the boats and you sit there watching the fireworks from inbetween the close fireworks by the castle and the ones further back. You don’t get the audio from the show, but fortunately for us we got stopped right by the Agrabah miniature, so we got to listen to “A Whole New World” over and over while being in the middle of fireworks. It was actually surprisingly fun!
Back at Oga’s! It’s not as busy!
The cast members in here are really fun. There’s a drink called a “Fuzzy Tauntaun” which has a foam on the top of it that has a numbing agent that makes your tongue a tingly and slightly numb. The bartender here was giving the customers at the table a hard time for asking for a straw for their Fuzzy Tauntaun. He kept turning on his headlamp and watching them to make sure they were drinking it without a straw. And there are some little easter eggs that they do too. Poor DJ R3X.
What drink to get is a big decision here…
I didn’t get any more pictures here because we were busy singing and clapping to songs and such… Here’s the main playlist for the cantina though, if you want to sing along with us!
(There’s also a 2nd album, but it’s new and doesn’t get used as much.)
After Oga’s it’s now 11PM and we have time for a few more late-night rides! We didn’t actually walk through Swiss Family Robinson, but it looked cool, sadly the camera didn’t really get it. And as usual, on Indiana Jones, Emily looked into the Idol’s eye and doomed us all.
Swiss Family Robinson!Indiana Jones!Space Mountain!A busy night in space!Someone always nods off on this one it seems.
Matt opted out of this one after sugar and drinking and Emily stayed with him. Amusingly, the car we were supposed to get into had to be taken offline because the previous rider had, perhaps, had a little too much to drink before riding? Whoops.
It’s now almost midnight. Just as we get off the ride the park officially closes. It’s still both surprisingly busy, and quite empty. By time we reach the exit gate it’s after midnight, and we started at 7AM. This may actually be my record for longest Disney day ever? Sweet!
The Park Is Now ClosedThe main street shops, however, are still open. Goodbye Disneyland!
What a fun day! Fortunately we don’t have to get up at 5:30 in the morning, our breakfast isn’t until 8:45. I think we all hit the pillow and crashed as soon as we got back.
In case you were curious about the DVC 2-bedroom suite at the Disneyland hotel, here are a couple more pictures, as well as pictures of the rest of the art in our Fantasia themed room!
Behind the murphy bed.The picture doesn’t really convey this one. It’s several panes of glass, so it has a lot of 3D effect.
Breakfast was at the neighboring hotel, the Pixar Place. The restaurant theme was “Maple”, so there were maple donuts, maple bacon, etc… We will all be in food comas for the entire trip home.
After getting back to the room and packed up we waited around a little while before heading to the airport. Of course this meant more playing with lightsabers!
After that it was a ride to the airport, and home we all go!
Well that was Disneyland! An excellent 4 day adventure. As Julian says we “sucked the marrow from it’s bones”. I think he’s right, we did pretty much everything possible to do! And now most of us get to return home and go back to work in the morning. Matt and Emily were smart and get an extra day off.
Here’s a couple more pictures that were leftovers that didn’t get uploaded in the right order!
Lightsaber building experience!
Lastly, Esme has been quite upset while I sit and write up this blog post at home, she very much wanted me to be playing in a sunbeam with her in the kitchen instead, and is now angrily snuggling on my lap.
So what’s our next adventure going to be? Currently the next scheduled vacation is in 2025, but we’ll try not to make you wait that long!
Day 3, we’re back to California Adventure for… more adventure?
Our adventure started with…. standing in line. Unfortunately the one ride that we wanted to get to early (because the line gets very long) was having problems, and after we used our entire early-admission period waiting for it, they finally said they weren’t going to open for a while and kicked everyone out of line. Oh well, it was worth a try! So we poked around Cars land!
Cars Land and the Dancing Cars ride!
After that we went to Pixar Pier and road the Incredi-coaster! This one is the one Bevin didn’t want to go on, because it goes upside-down briefly. But she went! We had fun, there was screaming.
Bevin is actually going to go on Incredi-coaster with us!
Didn’t get too many more pictures in the morning. We moved fast and zipped around the park doing rides while it wasn’t super busy yet. The cloudy weather seems to dampen everyone’s spirits around here. Worked great for us though! As usual we went pretty fast the first part of the day, and then came back for a break after lunch, and then went into the park for the evening. Both parks here have sections that are really beautiful after dark, so we always want to make sure that we have plenty of energy to spend the time in the evening.
Hanging out after our midday break before we go back to the park. Bevin loves her Remy shoulder friend.Sunset over Downtown DisneyRadiator Springs at nightCars Land at night is really REALLY pretty.So much neon.
After we were done in the park for the evening we stopped by Trader Sam’s tiki bar on the way back for a little while before turning in for the night.
Matt and Emily sharing a drink that comes in a bowl: the Uh’oa. Possibly named for the “uh oh…” sound that is universally made when it is delivered.
Matt and Emily’s drink was fun. It arrived, was lit on fire, and then they sprinkled cinnamon on the flame (causing sparks) to appease… pele perhaps? Anyway, gods were appeased, and drinks were had. Everyone wins.
The two sugary non-alcoholic concoctions Bevin ordered for us caused almost as much “uh oh!!” as Matt and Emily’s drink!
Also bonus like Ukelele player!
I also had a Dole Whip. Delicious pineapple soft-serve, with pineapple juice over it.
And then sleeping. Early to bed, early to rise, for tomorrow we go back to Disneyland proper again!
We had a mixed sunny/drizzly day today, so we got a few more pictures!
We bounced around the park a lot, it was a 20,000+ steps day. We managed to do a lot of stuff and not stand in too many lines though, so it was worth it!
We had lunch at Blue Bayou, the restaurant inside Pirates of the Caribbean, which was fantastic. Julian gets up very early in the morning months in advance to get us the best reservations so we can do things!
We didn’t get to see the fireworks because there were winds so they cancelled the fireworks portion of the show, but otherwise it was a great day. Didn’t get rained on too much, didn’t have any significant difficulties getting the rides we wanted. Very successful.
Heading down main street!We stood in line so that we could… stand in line. But hey, we’ll be one of the first people into the park!And we walk right on to Millennium Falcon!Julian is considering a lightsaber umbrella.These pirates have been attempting to get the key from that dog for a loooooong time.Always good to see Red, even if she’s still terrorizing the locals.From the musty land of piracy, directly into the musty land of forbidden temples.Everyone seems remarkably calm for being about to enter a forbidden temple.We seem to have been captured by stormtroopers.I don’t love the new style X-Wings, but it’s still cool.Got to do the remodeled Swiss Family Robinson tree!Another view of the park from the top of the tree.I would definitely live here. Bevin exploring the tree.Maybe our living room could look like this?We’ve gone to the bayou for lunch! In the backgrond there are people sailing off for pirate adventures!Bevin is about to undertake a very dangerous Monte Cristo…Happy Birthday was sung to Matt. He hated it, which made us happy.It’s been raining on and off. I sort of like cloudy Falcon.Oga’s cantina! DJ R3X in the background.If anyone ever asks: we shot first.Was Matt… sleeping on Space Mountain?The castle at night. It’s…. tiny.We could watch fireworks from here…Fireworks were cancelled, so we decided to sail into the jungle in the darkness. We went back to pick up Matt and Emily’s lightsabers before we left for the night.
The build-a-lightsaber experience was fun. Matt and Emily both built their own, so we got to go in with them. Anyone who’s a major Star Wars fan will definitely enjoy the experience of building their own saber.
When we did the Millennium Falcon ride we did the “Chewy Mode” where instead of getting instructions you can understand you just get yelled at in Wookie for the whole ride. So of course we ran into absolutely everything, and barely succeeded. But it was super fun.
Jungle Cruise after dark is always fun too. As we sailed past the gorillas “Anyone wearing yellow try not to sit still, and don’t make banana noises!” cracked me up.
After a long day we went back to our room and everyone crashed. Up extra early tomorrow for the resort-guest extra time!
After just over 3 hours on the nearly empty plane, most of which Bevin spent sleeping on my shoulder, we arrived at SNA in Orange County. None of that LAX business for us! Our flight got in about an hour before the Portland gang arrived though, so we grabbed a drink and played some Tak.
After everyone arrives we take our ride to the hotel with a California driver who clearly thought most every traffic law was more of a suggestion. But we survived, got to the Disneyland hotel, and then off to the park we go!
Our room is a 2 Bedroom suite that’s Fantasia themed! There’s cool art everywhere, including a mosaic in the master bath.
There are two parks at “Disneyland”, one is Disneyland proper, and the other is California Adventure. That’s where we went next!
Wait a second, we just got off a plane, why are we doing a ride that’s putting us back on a plane?!
Soarin’ is a motion ride that puts you up into this big half-sphere screen and takes you flying over the landscapes, while shooting scents that match the landscapes at at you!
Cool thing is that right now they’re doing the classic “Soarin’ over California” version, rather than the Soarin’ over the USA that’s normal, so all the scenes are from CA. And there are even more scents! (Pine forest, orange grove, ocean mist)
We didn’t take too many pictures through the afternoon because it was raining so hard and phones were tucked into pockets. But we grabbed a few!
Radiator Springs is one of the absolute best forced perspective things I’ve ever seen. It looks huge, it looks real. Photos don’t really capture it well. It’s really impressive. And it’s a fun little race-car ride too!
And because we’re all adults, and can do what we want, we went on the Little Mermaid ride, and sang along. Sha-la-la-la-la-la my-oh-my!
And that’s about it from our first 3/4-ish day at the park! We got… slightly damp. We had a great lunch, and a great dinner, none of which we took pictures of, and then went to the “fireworks” show, which is actually lasers and lights and water at California Adventure. Also not pictured, because it was cold, and damp, and we had our hands in our pockets.
