Sunday Activities at Airventure

Saturday night into Sunday morning it rained and remained IFR. Just before noon the skies began to clear and the flood gates opened up with massive numbers of arrivals, just as I had predicted. I have a handheld air band radio that I can use un case of emergencies where the aircraft comms are lost, and I tuned to the arrival approach control and tower frequencies to listen to the non-stop instructions from the tower for all the arriving aircraft. At one point a Mooney was on short final and the tower folks noticed that his gear was not down and they immediately focused all their attention on him and kept repeating very quickly check your gear down check your gear check your gear. Apparently he got it down in time, but that was a close call. 

Mike Rettig showed up after driving up with his friend Jeff on Sunday afternoon, and I gave him the tour of the new trailer. Mike likes the air conditioner a lot, and frankly so do I. The sun finally came out in the late afternoon, and the temps warmed up and it got humid, as expected, so the AC was put to the test all afternoon and evening long. 

My next post will be about the Monday activities at Airventure, which is the official start of the week-long event.  It did not disappoint. The campground is all but full already and there are thousands of airplanes and people here. I took a bunch of pics that I will try to download of some things that are sure to amaze you. 

Oh, I did have one more P.S. entry from Saturday's activities at the local Walmart. After I got my groceries back to the trailer I was unloading everything and putting it away, and I reached for the final bag, which I thought only had a 6 pack of small cans of 7 up in it. Well, it turns out that the idiot moron behind the counter at Walmart (a young dumb college - aged kid that could have cared less about what he was doing as I stood there watching him, had put both a small bottle of Dawn dishwashing detergent and the 7up in the same bag! You can guess what happened. The 7 up cans compressed the plastic Dawn bottle and blew the cap right off it, spilling most of the soap into the bag and all over the cans of soda. I spent an hour cleaning up that mess as it dripped all over the trailer floor and elsewhere. I still plan to take it back to the store when I have time and get my new bottle of dish soap, and perhaps say a few choice words to the idiot that created the problem if I just happen to see him again. That was really the only major headache I have had since I got here, so I'll take what I can get at this point. 

More next time.... including info about Monday morning Airventure wake up calls, aircraft displays, meeting old friends, making some new ones, attending classes and forums, and more - it was a great day.

Saturday activities at Airventure 2018

I forgot about one more Friday arrival event that I wanted to tell everyone about. When I arrived at the check-in lanes, it was just cloudy, but I could see that up to the north things were looking rather dark. This always means that weather is on the way. Just as I got out of my truck an announcement came over the grounds alert and warning PA system, to tell us all that bad weather was coming and to seek shelter or “prepare yourselves.” I hurried up to the check-in counter and I was glad that there was nobody standing in line. So I was able to get my credentials and passes right away, before the storm hit. Just as I got back into the truck, it hit. One thing about the campground check-in process – these are some of the first EAA volunteers you will encounter, and they are prepared to handle just about anything. While filling out my vehicle pass I noticed that all the parking guides had mysteriously vanished from sight. But, a few seconds later I saw all of them returning with rain gear on – ready to resume their duties. Hats off to these men and women who braved the elements to help get me where I needed to go.

After the long drive on Thursday and Friday, and setting up the campsite and checking all the major systems for proper operation, I made it to the local Olive Garden for dinner – always a welcome end to the long travel days. Then it was back home again to sleep in my new queen-sized trailer bed for the first time. All I can say is that having a queen sized bed instead of a sofa to sleep on was a real blessing. 

Saturday morning arrived and was very cloudy and dreary and rainy – definitely IFR weather. This meant that the thousands of VFR pilots that normally arrive on Saturday and Sunday were going to have to wait until the weather improved. This is also a real problem for ATC, who will be overwhelmed with arrivals when the flood gates are opened after the weather improves. I felt sorry for them because I knew what was in store later on. This is when arriving at OSH can become very dangerous with so many airplanes in the air.

After waking on Saturday morning it was time to head out to pick up my media credentials, and then out for some breakfast and my annual Oshkosh grocery shopping for the week. Breakfast was at the local IHOP – good stuff!  I do the grocery shopping at the local Walmart, and it has also become a ritual of sorts for m every year. I basically buy the same supplies and groceries each year, and it pretty consistently costs me about 100.00 or so.

As I arrived at the Walmart parking lot, I heard this obnoxious sounding whine. I got out of my truck and as it finally wound down I realized that it was the severe weather and disaster warning sirens that were going off. IT was around noon so I am not certain if they were just testing, or if the alarm was for real. Either way, it gets your attention. Luckily I did not see any severe weather at that point and so I continued on my errands.

When I walked into Walmart, it was just cloudy. When I came out with my groceries, it was pouring rain. SO I had to make the mad dash to the truck and throw the bags inside (except for the eggs of course), and tried to keep from getting to terribly wet, which did not work at all. After that it was time to head back to the campground to put the groceries away.

While I was doing that, I was listening to the archived interviews from past EAA radios episodes that are broadcast on AM 1210 and FM 96.5 the weekend before Airventure starts. All of a sudden I heard the interview that EAA Chapter 301 president and friend Mike Rettig and many others gave to talk about an amazing volunteer effort to fulfill a dream for a brain tumor survivor by the name of Alex Cuellar to come to Oshkosh. Mike and several others were instrumental in starting a movement just before Airventure 2012 to get Alex up to Oshkosh. Amazingly all this work became a reality, and they were able to fulfill Alex’s dream. Unfortunately I think it was less than a year later that Alex finally lost his battle with brain cancer, but the work that Mike and the others did to provide him with one last wish was nothing short of extraordinary. This interview on EAA radio is absolutely fantastic, and can be searched for and heard on EAA Radios website. If you want to know what the true meaning of volunteerism is, I strongly urge you to take a listen to that interview. It brought back a lot of memories from that trip back then, and it was great that EAA decided to play that particular archive on Saturday. 

here is a link to a VAF post that started the whole thing out:
http://www.vansairforce.com/community/showthread.php?t=85196

And here is the link to the EAA Radio archive segment at Airventure 2012:
http://spirit.eaa.org/airventure/radio/clips/2012/alex-quar.mp3

The rest of the day was spent trying to find places to put all my junk so that I could move around and re-acquire some table space. Not much else to do on a rainy day. I did however make my way to one of the camp stores just to see what they had. I was amazed at how much they actually did have. Just about everything you could think that you might need while staying at the campground at Oshkosh – they had it. Simply amazing. More about the Sunday events tomorrow……

Airventure 2018 - A daily blog

OK, so this is not going to stick entirely with the main purpose of this blog, but if you have followed my journey in past years, you know that the pilgrimage to Airventure  is a very important part of this entire airplane building process. Nowhere else on the planet will you get the much needed shot in the arm to help keep you motivated and moving toward your goal of building and flying your own airplane than at Airventure.

This year I decided to start posting what I hope to be a daily journal of this trip to give others an idea of what the ground travel side of this adventure is like. One of the “perks” I get as an EAA Chapter newsletter editor is that I am able to obtain media pass privileges that allow me to obtain a weekly pass to the Airventure grounds free of charge, as long as I fulfill my obligatory “media” duties by reporting Airventure activities back to the Chapter. This I decided t do that by posting to this blog as much as possible to capture all the interesting things going on.

THE JOURNEY

I have been taking my trailer up to Camp Scholler in Oshkosh since 2009, when I attended my very first Airventure. Not only does Airventure become the world’s largest gathering of airplanes for one week, but t also becomes the world’s largest campground for one week. It essentially becomes an entirely new city. There are tents and trailers and RV’s as far as the eye can see, and beyond.

Since my first trip in 2009, I have been traveling for 2 days to get there, stay the full week, and then I take two more days to travel back. The journey takes about 2,050 miles round trip. I break it up into two 500 mile segments, because I have found that I can only take about 8 hours of driving with the trailer on the back until I am rather fatigued. I always leave on the Thursday prior to the start of the event, which is always on the Monday of the last week of July each year.

I left and arrived early on the first trip because I had no idea what to expect for the first time, and I wanted to make sure I had enough time to allow for “issues” or delays. I have been doing it the same way ever since, and it has worked out well, so I have no reason to change the way that I do this. So Thursday, 7-19-18, I set out once again on my annual trek.

I had managed to check all the major systems on the trailer prior to leaving, but I had no time to organize and pack things correctly, since I had been racing to get  new tires put on and the hitch realigned the week prior to my departure. These were safety items that had to be done, as two of the tires on the trailer were not in good shape, and if the rig is not level, you put too much stress on one axel or the other and this is not god for the trailer or the truck.

I was leaving behind  record heat levels in Denver, and heading toward a rather disorganized monsoonal flow that had started up near Minneapolis. It was very strange and very abnormal to be cooling off as I headed further east toward Omaha, NE, my typical halfway stopping point for the day one part of the trip. The rig was handling just fine with no issues. Over the past few years I have found that I don’t like much of anything at all about Omaha – never have, even during my college travel days up to UND.  So I have been driving for about an extra hour to Avoca Iowa to get out of the valley and presumably away from some of the heat, as well as the roads.

For the record, Omaha has the worst road conditions in the entire USA, without question. My entire rig was just about shaken apart for the second year in a row. Never have I seen such horrible road infrastructure. It was so bad this year that I am now contemplating a new route – to stay away from Omaha entirely. Anyway, the rig seems to have survived, but things in the trailer were most certainly going airborne at times. Avoca also has a newer Motel 6 that was just finished a few years ago. It does not smell entirely like cigarette smoke yet, so I like to stay there for my overnight to take advantage of the AC.

The next morning I began my travels listening to the radio, and much to my surprise, the day before there were 3 major tornadoes in the Des Moines area, which was my next destination from Avoca, only 93 miles away. They caused major damage but no fatalities. This sent shivers up my spine because I had no idea this had happened, and I realized that had my travel plans been just one day off, I could have found myself in the middle of that mess.

One thing I have learned over the years – Iowa has some very violent thunderstorms. Monsoonal activity certainly does not help the situation. Luckily for me, I managed to avoid the situation, and just had low clouds, high winds, and some rain showers to contend with, but no tornadoes thank god!

From Des Moines on I-80 I go toward Cedar Rapids on I-380 until I get to the Highway 151 interchange, which is the diagonal highway that pretty much makes a straight shot at that point all the way to Oshkosh. I arrived at KOSH on Friday, 7-20-18, at about 5:00 pm Central time (oh yeah, you lose an hour from Denver to Oshkosh, somewhere near Kearney Nebraska.)  The campground has started adding more electric and hookup sites to the area that I have fond I like to camp at during the event, so the only way for me to stay in that area is to cough of the extra money for a hookup site – it’s 65.00 per day vs. 27.00 per day for a dry or generator camp site.

So I backed into my expensive patch of grass and set up home for the next week. I only had about enough energy left to go into town for some dinner, and they I came back and shoved everything out of the way on my new bed so I could have a place to sleep.  Turned on my new air conditioner and finally had a nice night’s sleep for a change.

IN the next post I will have some much more interesting stuff about pelicans and airplanes and EAA radio, and rain, rain, and more rain……. It’s not quite like Sloshkosh 2010 out here yet, but it ain’t very dry either. I am glad I got here when I did.

Where have I been since March of 2018?

I know, I know, where the heck have I been March – certainly not working on an airplane much. Crappy weather, house falling apart – same old excuses and interruptions. I did mange to order some prefabbed fuel pick up lines, Proseal, and a few other things, which also went through their own adventure during shipment. Apparently Fedex decided to all but destroy the original packaging from Vans. Admittedly this was rather package to assemble, because I had ordered a big can of Proseal, and I also ordered a replacement .032 x 12 x 3.5 foot piece of sheet aluminum for the leading edge mod on the right wing, since I screwed up the other one that I had ordered an eternity ago.

Even so, all Fedex had to do was put it on plane, then put it on a truck, and deliver it. Easy – right? Yes, until you factor in the sorting equipment in between each of those phases of delivery. Somewhere  in the middle of all that, a sorting machine got hold  of it and destroyed the packing. Amazingly, they did not seem to damage the parts – just the packaging. I knew something was up because my package did not arrive when I expected it to. When it did finally show up, the cardboard was mangled with packing tape, did not look at all like a Vans package, and had obviously been mangled or torn apart somehow. The only damage was a minor bend on one corner of the sheet aluminum that I ordered, but I also noted that Vans had cut it with the grain running the wrong direction.  A call to Vans took care of that, and a few days later I had the replacement part.

Vans wanted me to take pics of the packaging, which I did, and they confirmed that was not the way that it left their facility. Moral to this story s don’t  trust Fedex with anything. I wanted to use UPS but Vans talked me out of it because “they get a better rate with Fedex.” Next time I will use UPS.

A couple of other things have occurred since I last posted. I had wanted to get a new travel trailer, and decided that this year was the year for that to happen. I wanted something a little newer and larger, with built in air conditioning and a nicer master bed. Not hard to find a better bed, since I had been sleeping on the couch for years. While I was pursuing a new trailer, my truck decided to start nickel and diming me. Time to make a decision – so I spent the past several months researching trucks and trailers, and ended up getting one of each.

Then, as if that was not enough, I decided with all the delays in the plane build that I needed to bite the bullet again and order a quickbuild fuselage for my RV-8 from Vans. So, in the past few months I have acquired a new trailer, truck, and 75% complete airplane fuselage.  Oh, and I also spent the past 2 months trying to sell my old trailer, which finally did sell about a week ago.

To top it all off, work has been a nightmare – that’s about all I am going to say about that. So here I am, several months later, a LOT poorer, completely exhausted, and oh yes, I am writing this in Oshkosh Wisconsin after making the maiden voyage in my new-found ground-based travel machines.  I have been running non-stop for months now and I am completely exhausted. I only had time to throw everything from the old trailer into the new one wherever it would fit – no time to organize. More about the shakeout of the new rig and all about the Airventure 2018 journey in the next posts.