If a car leaves Vermont travelling Southbound on a Friday and a Baron leaves Florida travelling North East bound on a Saturday, where will they meet? No this is not a middle school math problem run amuck. This was my Saturday.
Let's rewind a bit. Rachel had been in Vermont the last few weeks, supposedly learning but I think it was just college kid camp. She and her trusty Hyundai made the trip North solo but she broke it into 3 days with a stop over at a friends house.
Coming home the plan was to crush it in two days. To improve the odds of this happening safely, CC offered to ride back with her the second day. The problem was to connect the two. I was of course volunteered to get them together. Day one got a late start, a story I am not allowed to discuss. Also the highways are insanely busy. This meant that Rachel ended up just South of DC last night, not as far as we had hoped. We thought that Saturday morning things would be better on I-95 but that was terribly wrong.
Initially we planned to meet at Rocky Mountain, NC but construction, heavy traffic and a Starbucks detour meant that would not work. I was prepared and called an audible, we would meet further up at Halifax Northampton Regional Airport in NC. It's about as far as you can go in NC without ending up in Virginia.
The revised plan had us both arriving around 11:30. Blissfully ignorant of the changing highway conditions we fired up and headed out. I had one other problem though. I had to come back home and as we were leaving some serious storms were brewing and slowly creeping into the area. Our departure was smooth though and it was a pretty simple flight.
Arriving, CC checked on Rachel and she was still far far away. Also a King Air was blocking the self serve pumps. I looked at the weather back home and it stunk. After a quick pow wow, I left CC in the rather nice airport and headed to Allendale South Carolina for Gas. Gas in NC was expensive, there was a wait to get it and I wanted to have the maximum amount of gas available for when I got to the weather.
The hop to Allendale was easy. They even pump for you and even though the pump is terribly slow, the people are super friendly, the place is cool, clean and has big candy bowls. Rachel had eventually found CC which was a relief as I did not want to head back to get her after all the work of delivering her. Full of gas I head home. It is supposed to take 56 minutes but I knew this flight would have a 10 minute detour. I had been watching the weather all day through the miracle of XM.
The thunderstorm that parked on our airport was finally moving North and there was a gap in the rain out West. The radar in the nose was a nice to have today, didn't really need it. Upon being cleared direct home I had asked to route via an intersection that would keep me out of the rain. Traffic must have been really light as I was cleared to deviate as I like and then direct home.
I was able to fly along the edge of the rain and once I was about 60 miles out take a left and head for home. I could see the airport 35 miles out. The entire time I had a dark blob off my left and I did use the radar to confirm that I didn't want to fly through the rain but after looking really bad, was an easy detour to get home.
And the girls. No idea, I assume they are somewhere on I-95, I guess they will turn up in a few hours...
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