I’m writing this from my camper at Seminole, having escaped from frozen Ohio for a sneak preview of the 2014 season.  My excuse was the January running of Andy McQuigg’s Weekend Grand Prix race series, but really I was just finding it too hard to wait until the Seniors in March ;-).

The night before departure – The 4″ of new snow was an added bonus – had to clear it out before I could get the camper out of the garage

All loaded up and ready to go (note the snow clearing job)

I started out from Ohio last Saturday, and boy was that a loonnnngggg day! Because the temps were so low on Friday, I decided to wait until the morning of my departure (Saturday) to pull the camper out of its nice protected niche in my garage and mount it up on the camper. Because this was also the day of our club board meeting, this meant a 6 am wakeup so that I could load everything up and still make the 70 miles to CCSC by 0930, attend the meeting, and then drive from there to John Mittell’s (BZ) house near Huntsville, Alabama to overnight. I got it all done, but the cold made everything much slower than normal, and I wound up late for the board meeting (bad precedent).

The run to Huntsville was uneventful, and I was soon rid of all the snow. John and Paula fed me a wonderful dinner, put me to sleep, fed me breakfast in the morning, and were generally great hosts—thanks! Went through Atlanta on Sunday, so the traffic wasn’t too bad. I got an email from Mitch Deutsch (6I) saying that he spotted me on the way through; now that the trailer says ‘TA’ again, I’m no longer incognito! ;-).

Yesterday (Monday) was an interesting day. In the morning it was reasonably warm, and might have been soarable for a while, but SGP is closed on Mondays so couldn’t find out. However, in the early afternoon, a dark band of clouds roared in from the west, and the wind shifted abruptly to the north; the Polar Express had arrived :-(.  Later in the evening, I was able to do an assembly/disassembly cycle on TA, just to make sure I still could figure out which wing went on which side of the fuselage, and to reload all the cockpit gear I had removed for the annual at M&H.

TA in her new livery, getting aired out for the first time (as TA, anyway) in Florida

Got to fly for the first time today. Conditions were poor to crappy, but I was still able to stay up for an hour or so. The lift was badly broken up by the north wind, and stopped abruptly at 2500 msl (and then 2000 msl, and then 1700 msl…). But, I was happy because I got in another assembly/disassembly cycle, and also got to check out the new site database and scrape some thermalling rust off. All in all a good—albeit short—day ;-).

Hopefully the next few days leading up to the GP race on Saturday will allow a bit of XC practice, and maybe not so much dependence on the camper’s heater. Stay tuned!

Frank (TA)