Airplanes and Flying

2006 Land of Enchantment RV Fly-In Trip Report

Land of Enchantment RV Fly-In Official Website:
http://www.landofenchantmentflyin.com

Bill Jaques and I were going to fly our RV9As over together, so we had a quick chat about the situation and decided to see what happened later in the morning.

The radar cleared up a little, so we decided to start the trip and see how far we could get. We stopped at Casa Grande (CGZ) to top off the tanks and got rained on a little. Finally, we launched toward the Land of Enchantment.

The cloud bases were down around 7,000 for part of the way. As we got in closer, the terrain was rising and the ceilings were falling. The last 50 miles or so was practically spent waving to people on the ground and looking for stray power lines.

When we got to about 10 miles out, it was raining at Santa Teresa (5T6) but we could clearly see the runway. There were only a few people coming in, so we made straight in approaches to runway 10 and found a parking place.

This was my first time at LOE and I give it high marks. The blatantly non-commercial event seemed to be well organized and everyone was friendly. We saw a bunch of the usual characters from Glendale and Deer Valley and met some new people.

The Saturday night banquet was a catered BBQ deal and the food was pretty good. They had a local micro-brewer also, but I don't drink much anymore. I had one cup of beer and I honestly didn't think much of it, but I am not a beer expert by any means.

Heres a picture of myself, Bill and Stan hanging out by the War Eagle Museum.

Once everyone had been fed, the sponsors did some talking about the charities that we were supporting and a proclamation was read by a city council person (Did anyone count how many times she said "Dona Ana county"? :-) ).

The raffle was of course the big deal of the night. I could only afford to buy one ticket, so I was hoping for something good, like a Garmin 496! Well, imagine my surprise when Doug called my number for one of the "really nice shirt" prizes. Oh, that anti-climatic feeling.

I suppose I shouldn't be ungrateful... after all the money goes to a good charitable cause, and most people didn't win anything. But c'mon, who is going to wear a Titan ECI shirt, no matter how nice it is, except to do yard work or car repair. Perhaps next time they should give away shirts that read "I flew to LOE and all I won in the raffle was this stupid shirt".

OK, OK, I am just kidding. When I come back next year I am going to buy two tickets!

Sunday morning came around and while there wasn't much activity on the radar, the whole area was socked in. El Paso and Las Cruces were reporting 700ft broken and 1,300 ft overcast. There were a bunch of pilots staring hopefully at the bleak skies when we got to the airport. A couple of times there were blue patches showing, but hopes of an early departure were soon dashed. A few people took off IFR, and they literally disappeared into the mist just a couple hundred feet off the ground.

We decided to go to breakfast and come back in a while. At about 10:30, flight service said a hail storm was coming up from Mexico, and we had a window back to Arizona. Of course, we booked out of there quick.

In reality, the trip home was almost less eventful than the trip out. The ceilings were a little higher and we just had to dodge a few rain cells. Not really a big deal after all.

Kearney had a little rain, but by the time we hit Coolidge it was blue skies back to Goodyear. Thanks to Bill for the in-flight pictures!