Hey Everyone! Well its time for another update!! I’m writing this to you from a motel in the armpit of nowhere! A town called San Miguel with a population of about 4000 people, with no Internet access (I’m writing this on word and you’ll get it a day late!!), no hot water and very few channels on the TV!!! But that’s a story for later on!

San Diego itself is a really impressive city! It’s somewhere both of us would like to come back to and spend some time! While we were here we went to visit the USS Midway. It’s a US Navy aircraft carrier that was the flagship of the fleet for operation Desert Storm in the first Gulf War. Its docked permanently now in San Diego bay and is home to a very impressive array of old Naval fighter planes… and the two of us finally got to see the F-14 tomcat! :-)

So we woke up in San Diego on Thursday morning with the intention of flying to Boulder city in Nevada and then flying from there to over fly the Hoover dam a few times and the on down the Colorado river and into Phoenix for the night!! And for once I’m happy to report that it worked exactly as planned!!

We left San Diego fairly early on Thursday morning and flew out back over the mountains towards the east for the first time on our trip! On departure it was fairly busy due to the controlled airspace around San Diego but I still got the chance to admire Miramar from above one last time!! Miramar (also known as Fightertown USA) is the main Naval air base of the US Navy and also home to the real Top Gun pilots! Anyway, it was a relatively straightforward flight into boulder city in Nevada. There was very little to the airport and town but we did get to see Las Vegas off into the distance!

From Boulder City Pete was at the helm and I was chief cameraman for the Hoover Dam! We climbed out of the airport to the east straight out over Lake Meade which is really impressive and turned down south to see the dam appear from around the corner! The Dam itself has to be one of the most impressive sights of the trip for me! To think that it was built by people with little or no experience, mostly hanging from dodgy ropes and balancing on dodgy gantries, with the Colorado river diverted through tunnels blasted into the mountains either side of the valley! And all of this without any cities or towns around to support the workers! The Dam is the main reason that Las Vegas even exists today! I’ve watched so many documentaries on the building of the dam and have flown around it repetitively on flight sim, but nothing compared me for the sight itself! They’re currently building a new bridge in front of the dam for the Interstate so I’m delighted to have seen it from the air before the view was ruined!

Anyway, I’m waffling! From here we flew down the valley where the Colorado acts as the border between 3 states, California, Nevada and Arizona! It was pretty plain sailing all the way into Phoenix Goodyear airport. We stopped here for the night and went on a mission to find a car licence plate that said phoenix on it! Unfortunately we picked the wrong university and rather than heading for the University of Phoenix, we headed direct to the State university! Everything I wanted was there, but instead of Phoenix, it all said Arizona!!!

So after our night in phoenix we woke up to an overcast Phoenix! It all looked good since the cloud was at about 12,000 ft so we headed out to the airport planning to depart for El Paso! Once we got there we found out that the only place where the cloud was that high was where we were! Anyway, after many different routes planned out and lots of head scratching we decided to make a dash for it through a gap in the cloud with the nice clear weather following along behind us and we’d planned a way out to Tucson if we needed it!

As it turned out the cloud got a lot lower than we both expected and the ground around here isn’t all that low!! The cloud at the end was at 5000 broken, with few at about 4200, ground level had come right up to meet us at 3250! Thankfully the waypoint we were aiming at was an airport, and with one look at each other we were on the ground in no time! So we were down, but had no idea what to expect, or if there’d even be anyone at the airfield! As it turned out we landed in this little community filled with pilots, and quite possibly the nicest people we’ve met over here! Also on the ground we met 2 American pilots both called Ryan, about our age, both building hours toward their commercial licences also out of Phoenix for El Paso! So once the rain stopped we all got a quick guided tour of their hangers and saw all the planes! Some really impressive machines! After the tour I headed off into town with one of the pilots and one of the Ryan’s and Pete went up with Ryan eile into Marv’s mobile home on the airfield to get some coffee!

Ryan and I went into town to get the keys to the motel before the office closed at 4! Once we were done we got a guided tour of the town by Vern! It took about 5 minutes!! After our tour we went back to join the others at Marv’s place for a coffee! By this stage the cloud had cleared into two beautiful rainbows and some lovely blue skies! With this we all decided to do a bit of local flying! We had no time to get anywhere and all the nasty clouds were still off on the distance! One of the Ryans went flying with a local in a lovely 1940’s luscome tail dragger! Pete did some circuits in our chariot as I had flown the leg that morning and I flew with Ryan eile in their plane! The Americans were flying a newer version of our plane with a full digital cockpit! It was really impressive to see it in action and to top it all off we were listening to Guns‘n Roses on Ryans Ipod as we flew! It’s played into the headset and turns off automatically when anyone talks in the plane or on the radio! So Sweet!! Got to get me one of them!! So after an hour of jollying around the Arizona skies, we all headed back to Marv’s place! Marv is a retired businessman who lives about a 2-hour drive from San Manuel and is currently training there. Rather than driving the few hours he lives on the field in a mobile home and his wife comes up and down to visit him! He took us in to his mobile home, fed & watered us and then brought us all out to dinner and back to the motel for the evening!

Tomorrow morning at the airfield there’s a breakfast fly in and apparently 100 pilots from the surrounding area are coming to the field to get fed and then the FAA are putting on a seminar on mountain flying (would have been handy about a week ago J)! If the weathers good we’re going to have some breakfast and go, but if its not great we might hang around for the seminar! Either way, Marv’s getting up out of his bed to come collect the 4 of us from the motel at 7 am to go and get a free feed!!

Anyway, I’m off to bed! We’ll keep you posted on our progress! Hope you haven’t all fallen asleep reading this, but I don’t have much else to do here but write! :-)