On vacation I try not to be on a schedule but Monday we had booked a tour in South Dakota so we got going early (8AM mountain time) so that we would have plenty of time. The tour only cost $6 so if we missed it, no great financial loss but it was one I wanted to see.
Leaving Denver was mostly easy. I had filed an instrument flight plan and before departure you call for your clearance. They read you your clearance limit, your route, initial and expected final altitude, squawk code (used for ATC tracking) and the departure radio frequency. I had filed pretty much direct and up until now I had been getting the normal "as filed" route.
Today I got "Denver 9 departure, Radar Vectors, Gil VOR, Victor airway 209, Scots Bluff VOR, Victor Airway 169, Rapid city VOR, Direct Rapid City. Luckily my computer program understands all this and I had soon reviewed the Denver 9 which is 2 pages explaining I will turn right on departure to an assigned heading which they will tell me soon, I punched in all this data (yes punched as when we used to interact with computers using cards), confirmed it made sense and then sent it via Bluetooth to the primary GPS.
Now we were ready to go. So on departure I was given an initial heading of 350 as expected and after a few miles the controller said, cleared direct Rapid City. That basically wiped out all that work and all that programming. In the end we did not go direct as once we were over Wyoming (note it did not count as we did not land), I requested a re-route to take us by the Crazy Horse and Rushmore monuments.
The controllers were very friendly and helpful and set us up for our sightseeing. Around Rushmore you either need to maintain 7700 feet (about 2000 above the monument) or a 1/2 mile laterally. We did both as I like to be a quite flyer and not bother the people on the ground.
We were nice and early and Avis dropped our car off so we were soon racing down the highway and I do mean racing, the speed limit is 80. We were off to the Minuteman Missile National historic site. You can book a tour of a launch control facility, like the one you saw in War Games.
On the way we stopped at the famous Wall Drug Store. This is a place in the middle of nowhere and is like Rock City or South of the Border in that they have a gazillion signs. We had lunch and enjoyed the attraction.
At the missile control center we arrived early and met our ranger tour guides. The tours are limited to 6 people at a time but the other family never showed. Our ranger had been a missile officer so we scored a great private tour. As he had lived the cold war I found his account quite interesting and informative. We got to go down to the capsule where they stood watch ready to turn they keys to fire the missiles.
After our tour we went to the visitor center to see some more displays and then it was off to the badlands which were conveniently about 5 minutes away. We are not by nature outdoors people. We like showers and nice beds but we really do enjoy visiting nature. We visited several national parks on this trip and they are incredible treasures. The park service does a great job and they were always helpful and friendly. I did not expect much of the Badlands but.....
They surprised me with their great beauty. It is well worth the visit. As an add on we drove down a 5 mile dirt road to see prairie dog town and several other animals. I have never gotten a rental car this dirty. I felt bad enough that I actually paid a few bucks to run it through a car wash that evening as I was embarrassed to bring it back so dust encrusted.
One thing about flying yourself is you have no luggage limitations as in we can haul over 200 pounds easily. We had well under 100 pounds but still were over packed. We took a few minutes to consolidate our clothe into one bag so we could leave the extra in the plane. After a nice steak dinner we called it quits for the day and got some rest.
Nice write up.
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