Vigo County: Family Day Trip
We got an invitation a few weeks ago to my cousin’s high school graduation party, in Vigo County. Since this is where my (Caleb’s) family is from, we thought it might make for a nice little day trip and opportunity to see family.
The original plan was to fly our Cessna 182 to Sky King airport, which is close to my mother’s house, and get picked up for lunch with some of that side of my family. However, strong winds scared me away from going there and instead I opted for Hulman Field, which has longer runways and more options for landing.
We loaded up the plane and left around 10AM. Isaac had a ball on the way over.
Flying into Terre Haute was really slow. We had a pretty strong headwind, so we were only making around 100kts groundspeed, so it took about 50 minutes for us to get there.
There’s restricted airspace next to the airport, hence why I have to go north before heading west.
Not my actual track, but approximately how we went.
My mom picked us up at the airport and we transferred our stuff, and we got a nice picture to remember the place by.
We headed to my stepfather’s parents’ house and ate lunch. I haven’t had home-fried fish in quite some time; it was very tasty.
From there, we headed over to my uncle’s house for the graduation party. On the way we drove through the Collett Park area, which is an area I spent a lot of time as a child. We have a picture of me sitting in front of a house near 10th and Indiana, and thought we might try to recreate the same picture with Isaac in the same place.
The recent storms that rolled through devastated the place pretty badly though. Trees were down all over the place, including where we wanted to take the picture. In addition, people were working hard on cleanup, so we didn’t stop.
We did, however, run by my old elementary school (pronounced: Wabash) and got a picture.
After this moment of reminiscing, we drove over to the graduation party in West Terre Haute. My uncle’s house had been rocked by the recent storms as well, with a large tree down in the yard and several noticably down in the woods surrounding their property. He also mentioned they had been without power for about 4 days, and it had just come back on the previous evening.
It was a very hot day; much hotter than the previous days had been. The events were outside, and staying cool was key. It didn’t take long for Isaac to figure out how best to do that.
Unfortunately the water was freezing cold like, so cold I don’t think they really intended that anyone was going to get into the pool. However, once our kid sees the pool there’s no keeping him out. He’ll happily jump right in, sink, take on 6 gallons full of lung-water, come back up, cough it out, and laugh about it. He loves the pool.
Someone was going to have to get in with him, and daddy drew the short straw. So for the next 30 minutes or so, I lost all feeling in my legs while I helped Isaac swim, jump off the side, and climb up and down the steps. Luckily others were in and around the pool at the time too, so he had lots of keep him occupied.
After a few hours of fun, we packed everything back and up headed back to the airport. Within minutes of the drive, Isaac fell asleep. He continued to sleep at the airport.
Even after we wheeled him out, transferred his seat back into the plane, got him strapped in, started the engine, and took off - he was still asleep. He opened his eyes once or twice on the way back, but remained pretty much asleep until we landed.
Thanks to the strong tailwind this time, we averaged over 150kts and made the whole flight in 30 minutes, takeoff to landing. Indy wasn’t able accomodate traffic alerts for us due to the high volume of Indy 500 flight traffic leaving, but we didn’t see any other planes the whole way back.