The Best-Laid Plans

How I would love to tell you that we landed in Gila Bend, Arizona, yesterday afternoon, and drank margaritas at their Cinco de Mayo Festival!

But I would be making it up because we never got off the ground yesterday. We waited until 2 p.m. for the mist to burn off. Then when we were pre-flighting the plane, we discovered a disconnected Something. The poor engineer, who was on his way out to Nevada for the weekend, was called back. He decided to put in new spark plugs and refresh the ignition system as well. We made a plan B, then a plan C, and then, at 8 p.m. with night having descended, we went to plan D and returned to the Corona Best Western for a meal of beef jerky and potato chips.

Today was mostly unflyable anyway, but the work on One Bravo Juliet was still going on, so we sloped back to the airfield at about 10.00 a.m. We spent two hours on a wild goose chase trying to get a spare key cut for the plane; ate some ice cream, drank some coffee, hung out a bit more. There was one issue the engineer wasn’t satisfied with – turned out he’d received a faulty NEW part, which finally got replaced at around 4 p.m., and we took Julie for a check flight. (Let’s face it, she’s obviously Julie.)

And she is fine.

Tomorrow is supposed to be fine, too, so that is our revised departure!