It’s Sunday and I am enroute to Taipei as I write this, aboard a Boeing 777 over the Pacific Ocean at 35,000 feet traveling at 560 mph, just south of Alaska. We’ll be landing in Japan in about 7 hours prior to heading to Taiwan. I usually don’t pull my laptop out of the bag during a flight, mostly out of consideration to the people who sit next to me, but on this flight, I have an empty seat next to me so I’m taking advantage of it, using it like my personal office ;-).

I was talking with a colleague at work who had taken another job last year and I’ve not seen much of him since, and I figured it was because he now has a job where he can work from home. But I also found out that his new job requires a lot of travel which means he’s gone from home a lot, much to his disappointment. He told me he’s boarded planes 30 times this year and I felt a little sorry for him, but then I realized that I’ve also gotten on planes this year nearly as often myself. I’m not talking about taking 30 trips, but rather the total number of connections made. This is my 4th trip to Taiwan this year and that usually includes 6 connections so that’s 24 connections for those trips alone and combined with trips to Oregon and California, it adds up to 28 connections. I’ll add 2 more when I’m in PA in a few weeks for Terri’s sister’s wedding. In the past 6 weeks, I’ve spent more nights away from home than I’ve been there because of travel. I should mention that 2 of those trips were for fun, namely the trip to Lake Tahoe and last week to Oshkosh, both of which I took in the LongEZ so they don’t count as boarding a plane ;-). This summer is turning out to be rather busy from a travel standpoint.

The Oshkosh trip went well with perfect weather traveling to and from the convention and, except for a torrential downpour one evening which resulted in a bent tent pole and some soggy conditions in the tent, it was pretty nice weather. Incidentally, the downpour that bent the tent pole on my tent caused my friend’s 4-person tent to blow away with his stuff in it and it damaged another friend’s plane. Fortunately, the damage was minor and easy to repair with a few hours work but the tent was a total loss. He managed to retrieve all of his stuff which was pretty wet but he was able to dry everything out the next day. It sure brought home the point of having good camping equipment and tying it all down properly. This was the second time in as many Oshkosh trips that he had to dry out his tent. Last year he forgot to extend his rain fly and his tent filled with water, about an inch or so. There were a lot of tents in need of repair after sustaining 60 mph winds that whipped through the airport.

I had to cut the Oshkosh trip short this year because of the Taiwan business trip which came up unexpectedly just a few days before I left for Oshkosh. I normally stay at Airventure for nearly a week, but this year I was only there for 3 days (not counting the travel days) but I still got to see a lot of interesting things, including the only public appearance of White Knight and Space Ship One as well as the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer. I’ll try to post some Oshkosh photos I took when I get back from Taiwan. I also saw Sir Richard Branson and Paul Allen and was only about 30 feet away from them. It has always amazed me about access one gets to the famous people at Oshkosh.

I didn’t buy any big ticket items this year, even though there were a lot of temptations. I got a new LightSpeed 30 3G headset to replace my aging LightSpeed 20K headset I purchased at Oshkosh 7 years ago which has recently started to act up with intermittent connections. I got a good deal on a trade-in, getting back most of what I paid for it. LightSpeed Aviation is a great company. When I had a problem with my 20K headset a few years ago, well outside the warranty period, they fixed it no questions asked and threw in a set of new ear seals to boot.

The huge fly-in at Oshkosh in nearly here and I’m planning to attend again. I’ve made it to this event for 13 out of the past 15 years, so this will be show #14 for me. I just never seem to get tired of it. I get a tremendous rush out of flying in there, meeting up with old friends, making new ones, and getting to see everything that is new (and old) in the world of Aviation. I’ll be camping out again, hopefully close to some of my friends, and I’m considering joining the mass arrival of Rutan-designed planes who will land just before the White Knight and Space Ship One.

Harrison Ford will be there again, although I doubt he’ll be available for a sit down. There’ll be the usual assortment of astronauts and famous aircraft designers like Burt Rutan and famous pilots like Chuck Yeager.

I think that the airplane toy market will be dominated this year by in-cockpit weather radar (XM satellite-based) along with cool GPS moving maps and EFIS displays. I’m so ready for in-cockpit weather radar. It seems that flying from Colorado to Wisconsin every summer usually results in skirting around or waiting out thunderstorms, much like the one in the top photo that I managed to skirt on the way back a few years ago. I’m also looking forward to seeing the HondaJet.

HondaJet will make it’s first appearance this year. I suspect it will cost quite a bit more than a luxury Acura.

White Knight shown with Space Ship One and a Starship as chase plane

Terri and I visited Lake Tahoe last week in the LongEZ and had a wonderful time there. For the past several years, I’ve been trying to get Terri to go to Jackpot, NV on the 4th of July weekend to attend a racing event for people who fly canard aircraft. However, July 2nd is her birthday and attending an event with ‘airplane people’ isn’t high on her list of priorities, especially on her birthday, so she has always resisted my offer. This year, I added a twist to it, based on her suggestion, that we spend the rest of the week relaxing at Lake Tahoe.

So bright and early on her birthday, we loaded up the LongEZ and flew from Greeley to Jackpot along with our friend Don Douglas, a veteran attendee of the Jackpot R.A.C.E. events.

I was a little worried Jackpot would be a hot, isolated, desolate, dustbowl, which would match my mental images of all the little towns in Nevada in the summer. Fortunately, Jackpot turned out to be a little oasis complete with a beautiful hotel within walking distance of the airfield that has a casino, restaurants, a swimming pool, and even some mature trees to provide shade. The last feature was definitely unexpected for me, since I didn’t know that any vegetation other than cactus grew in the lower-lying areas of Nevada. Best of all, Terri LOVED it, especially the pool! We got to meet a bunch of other canard aviators and even though we weren’t racing, I got to feel the excitement of the event vicariously through those who did enter the race.

I counted about 19 canards, as well as a few other planes of various lineages. I wished we could have stayed there longer, but we had reservations at a condo on the beach at South Lake Tahoe, so we only spent a night at Jackpot. However, now that Terri has had a chance to visit the place, she is a LOT more willing to return and looks forward to lounging around at the pool while I run off to do my ‘airplane stuff’ ;-).

We had originally planned to fly into the airport at South Lake Tahoe, which has a long runway and would have been only a few miles from the condo, but they didn’t have a rental car available, and the rental car counter wouldn’t be open for several days because of the July 4th holiday.

So we decided instead to land at the international airport at Reno and make the 1.5 hour drive from Reno in a rental car. This had several advantages, the first being that Reno has an 11,000 foot runway, a 24 x 7 FBO (Jet West), and is only at 4400 feet in elevation vs. 6200 at South Lake Tahoe, so it is better suited for a heavily-loaded LongEZ on a hot day. The people at Jet West really rolled out the red carpet and so we were pretty happy with the choice. In addition, I needed to fix a hot mag on the plane and they let me roll the plane into the hangar and provided me with an A&P mechanic and tools to attend to the task with minimal hassle.

We got to hike around the Lake Tahoe region and it is a truly beautiful place. We hiked Cascade Falls and Eagle Falls and I’ve provided a few photos here of those places.

The Ponderosa Ranch was also on the places to visit list, provided we could find it. When I was a young boy, my dad visited the Lake Tahoe region during one of his business trips and brought home some pictures of the Ponderosa Ranch and so we were determined to visit this tourist attraction. Unfortunately, we found the Ranch closed, presumably for repairs but we did some reading up on the place at the Mark Twain bookstore in Virginia City.

If you’ve ever watched any of the 480 (!) episodes of Bonanza, you’ll undoubtedly have the burning image of the map of the Ponderosa Ranch etched indelibly into your mind, and you’d notice it bordered on Lake Tahoe. Other cities on the map included Reno, Virginia City and CarsonCity. I realized these cities where not in the correct place until I looked closer and found that the map had the direction of EAST pointing upward instead of the more customary NORTH pointing upward. In any event, if the Ponderosa ever existed, would have encompassed a hundred square miles of prime real estate, which would be quite a bit for 4 people to manage.

In reality, the Ponderosa series was filmed primarily at Paramount Studios in Hollywood and around various locations in California and Nevada, including a few scenes around Lake Tahoe. It was an enterprising contractor named Bill Anderson who built the replica of the Ponderosa in Incline Village near north Lake Tahoe in 1967 after noticing that a lot of tourists were looking for it based on the map they saw each week on TV. After it was built, some scenes were filmed there, but it functioned mostly a tourist attraction, not as a film set. The Bonanza series eventually ran from 1959 until 1973, a period of 14 years, which made it one of the longest running series on TV. You can still see it daily on the TVLand channel.

After staying for 4 nights in South Lake Tahoe, we left for Greeley, covering the distance in about 6 hours of flying. That’s not too bad considering it would have taken over 17 hours of driving to cover the 1000+ miles by car.