So, my first official trip report is from yesterday, for an after work dinner hop to my old stomping grounds - Clare, Michigan. "The Gateway to the North" as the slogan goes. We've made this trip on several other occasions. They have a decent courtesy car and with the lower volume of (air) traffic, we can usually get it without having a reservation.
Unfortunately, the plane wasn't fueled when we arrived at the hangar (in Sparta), so we were almost 30 mins late leaving. That kind of chewed up a good chunk of the time we had planned for dinner, but we made the most of it. Anyway, so we took off from Sparta on runway 7. One of the neatest things we got to see on this trip was the snow line from the storm that came across MI last week. This has been clearly visible in the satellite photos as of late. We climbed to 5,500 feet and we could easily see the same snow line - no snow in Sparta, but plenty beginning around Lakeview. I haven't rendered all the video footage yet for you to see it from the cockpit, but here's a photo of what I'm talking about:
It was pretty cool to see such a distinct line such as this from the air. The remainder of the flight to Clare was pretty uneventful, though it was odd to go from almost spring at the house, to almost the dead of winter in less than 30 minutes.
Given our later than anticipated arrival, we had to settle for the drive-thru in Clare. It's not exactly what we had planned, but those kinds of things just seem to make it even more fun sometimes; like eating our food in an airport terminal we had all to ourselves. Good times!
Okay, so on to the fun stuff. Here's the video of us landing on runway 4 in Clare. The video begins on the downwind leg of our approach. For any of you familiar with the Clare area, after we turn onto our base leg (the first turn to the left in the video), you will notice Shamrock Lake off the left nose and downtown Clare off the right nose. We basically flew right over Pettit Park/Buccilli's Pizza. At the end of the video, as we turn to back taxi to the hangar, you will see me pointing - there was a yard of deer in the field. A yard means 50+ deer!!!! Not exactly something we get excited about given their proximity to the runway. You can't really make out the deer in the video due to the wide-angle lens. When we departed, I actually had to taxi down the runway to "encourage" the deer to move a bit further away, before back taxiing once again and departing. Enjoy the video and please feel free to comment or ask questions.
More from the air soon...
--Scott
