www.PSFmagazine.com | February-March 2017 | 25 into the town, which was six miles away. Faced with a very long walk, we talked to the security guard who suggested that if we ring the “Emergency number” for the airport manager, he wouldn’t mind. Ready to blame it all on the guard, we found the airport manager ready to come out and drive the 20 minutes to the airport and then a further 20 minutes into town for us–just another of the wonderfully supportive experiences we had. I have no real recollection of the rest of the evening, but believe we ate something at a Denny’s. • Total for the day: 507 mi, 8.5 flying hours. Day 3: The next morning, peering blearily out of the window, it seemed as though the wind was calm. We had gotten up early to try to reach our destination in good time, but despite the hour (or perhaps because of it), there was no transport. The hotel didn’t have a shuttle, there was no taxi service, and even though Uber claimed to be available in the town, apparently “he wasn’ t working that day.” (In small towns, apparently Uber is a single person!) A very kind guest at the hotel overheard our problem and decided to offer us a ride. He looked like a Marine but turned out to be a prison guard at the local Supermax facility – a remarkably nice guy who seemed to feel a lot of empathy for the people in his charge. At the airport, it wasn’t calm. At all. The wind sock was straight out, although it had shifted from west to northwest. And of course we needed to head northwest. We chatted to a group of British sas who had arrived there in a C-130 to do some parachute training. The officer in charge pointed at the windsock and said sarcastically “It ’s always worth coming here–for the weather.” They had been grounded for the last two days. Leg 9–79 mi to Twentynine Palms: We took off anyway. What the hell, we were flying a gyro! I expected that as we climbed, the winds would increase, but in fact they unexpectedly decreased, and our ground speed increased right up to a healthy 75 mph. Dinner at home began to look like a possibility. This was definitely the driest and most depopulated leg of the trip. It’s an amazingly arid area, with nothing but enormous solar farms populating the landscape. We were up at 6,500 feet to make the most of the kindly winds but it was really cold. Fortunately Twentynine Palms was not far and it was very warm there. Support Our Advertisers
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