Allen County: Cousin Joel turns 1

Sat, Aug 13, 2011

Saturday July 30th, 2011 – we ventured up to Ft. Wayne in Allen County to visit Annie’s sister, family, and extended family for their son’s first birthday party.

The plan was simple: fly up to Smith Field airport, get picked up, birthday party for a few hours, and come home.

And simple is what we did…

Leaving Columbus we climbed to 7000 ft, which put us right on the top of a cloud layer, so the first 20 minutes of the flight were in and out of the clouds.  That was fun, and a great way to keep my instrument practice handy.

The rest of the trip we basically stayed on top of the cloud layer until we had to descend into Ft. Wayne and even then our descent was mostly through broken areas, so no major cloud travel this time.

The south side of Ft. Wayne as we descended.

And downtown Ft. Wayne.

Landing at Smith Field was fun – the runways are fairly short so it was good practice for me. After a brief fiasco with parking (as in, I couldn’t find the right place to park the plane) we got the pickup and headed over for the party.

After a fun afternoon we headed home,