AirVenture 2022 | Day 2

July 19 | I recommend that you think carefully about staying a truck stop motel next to the interstate. Especially next to a downhill grade.

After I unplugged the refrigerator that keep turning on every fifteen minutes, I got back into bed and tried getting back to sleep. Just about the time I would drift off, another truck would come down the grade using his jake brakes. You know, the ones that go “brr-brr-brr-brr!” as the driver uses the engine compression release to slow the truck without overheating the wheel brakes.

I finally went into the tiny cubical of a bathroom and used my pocket flashlight to find my ear plugs for the rest of the night. I could still hear the jake brakes, but was able to eventually get back to sleep.

We were up at 4:30 and were in the free breakfast area before they officially opened at 6:00 am. The coffee was still brewing, so Calvin has a waffle and I had a bagel that just didn’t compare to a Homegrown Bagel back in Sonoma.

We got to the airport by 6, had the 182 loaded and pre-flighted by 6:30, the run-up done and were in the air at 6:48, twelve minutes before they would close the airport for the day. Mike doesn’t work there now, but Bob, bless his heart, carries on the tradition of care and service that Rawlins airport has always offered. It is one of my favorite stops on that route, even if it is in Wyoming.

The day was beautiful, so we set a course towards Caspar and on to Rugby, North Dakota for fuel, and an eventual landing in Rolette. This would be about a four-and-a-half-hour leg, so I had planned to stop along the way to stretch our legs and get fuel.

As I flew, I kept checking weather on Foreflight, and kept seeing surface winds of 20 to 30 knots, all coming from a system spiraling in from Canada. I kept checking airports, most of which had a single runway oriented to the usual winds, and kept seeing crosswinds of 20 to 25 knots, gusting to 30. Hmmm… Maybe we wouldn’t be stopping along the way.

We were again flying at 11,500’ and using up the bottle of oxygen in the back, and kept checking our oxygen levels with a little clip-on oxygen meter. The levels were lower that at sea level, but we didn’t seem to be losing consciousness from hypoxia.

As we flew, I kept checking the low-pressure system coming down toward Rolette on the iPad. It looked like a curving Chinese dragon, with green and yellow legs, claws and scales, and orange and red mouth, tongue and eyes, all looking menacingly at Rolette.

It was starting to cover Minot, about 90 miles west of Rolette, and we were still about 200 miles away. I felt like I was racing that dragon to my destination, and dreamed of dragons that night.

The rest of the route was covered by the typical scattered puffy cumulous that form as the air warms over the Midwest. They are no problem to fly over since you can always descend between them, but it is bumpy below them, so we stayed at our altitude for a long as we could.

As we approached Rugby, I could see the thunderhead moving in our direction, and could see the green indication of precipitation moving closer to the airport. I descended below the broken layer about fifty miles from Rugby, and had the advantage of seeing our ground speed increase as we traded altitude for speed. As we bumped along, I could hear a student pilot practicing landing at Devil’s Lake, about 60 miles southeast. I was impressed.

We got over the airport and saw the windsock pointing straight down the runway, with the darkening clouds off to the east coming closer. If you’ve ever been through a Midwest thunderstorm, you’ve felt the wind rising and gusting ahead of the front. “Squall’s a’comin’, Ma”, I always say to Catherine, who just rolls her eyes from the pleasure of hearing that once again.

I turned to downwind, which was just as fast as it was in Rawlins, turned base, then final, and again flew it on. I had the wheels on the runway, and was rolling along, pushing rudder and twisting the yoke as the wind direction kept changing with gusts from the side. Another careful taxi to the ramp, where we quickly tied down the airplane, put in the gust lock, covered the pitot tube, and chocked the wheels, and I finally felt safe.

We were going to stay the night in Rugby. The dragon could have Rolette tonight.

We got the courtesy car and checked into the Northern Lights Inn, and were early enough that we had time to drive the half hour to Rolette to retrieve my wallet at the post office before they closed at 2:30 CDT. We drove through the thunderstorm on the way.

We got to Rolette and I walked in confident that Calvin wouldn’t have to buy my lunch, yet again, after dinner and breakfast. The wallet wasn’t there. UPS hadn’t been seen in town yet. Overnight wasn’t yet overnight.

The postmaster, a very helpful young man, gave me his phone number and told me to call later. We had time to go to the Village Café. Just like Alice’s Restaurant, you can get anything you want at George’s Village Café. Calvin ordered a Ruben sandwich and I had the Gyro. It was delicious. George is Greek, as you might have guessed.

The background on my visits to Rolette is that Catherine was born there, and we went back on my first trip to Oshkosh in 2002. She flew commercially with her sister, and I flew my daughter, her partner and my granddaughter Ashley in the Stinson. We had our first meals at the Village Café, where we learned that George’s portions would feed two people for two meals. We also wound up buying Catherine’s grandparent’s house from cousin Floyd, but that a story for another day.

Back to the post office and my wallet.

After we finished our lunch, I walked back to the post office at about twenty after two while Calvin finished his coffee, only to find that UPS hadn’t overnighted yet. The post master told me to give him a call in about fifteen minutes to see if the delivery had arrived.

I dejectedly walked back to George’s knowing that I could still pick up my wallet tomorrow, maybe, but knowing that Calvin was buying me yet another meal. I made the last call at 2:35 expecting life to remain complicated, and was answered with “it’s here!” I sprinted to the post office from the restaurant, and the smiling young post master handed me my package through the door.

Life was good.

In case you were worrying about me sprinting to the post office, you should know that the business district of Rolette is about 1,000’ long, and the post office is less than 500’ from George’s.

In the twenty years I’ve been visiting Rolette, I’ve met many wonderful people, fell in love with the town and the beauty of the countryside and lush green farms, lakes and fields, and feel as if Rolette was a second home. Of course, I’ve never been there in winter.

Back to the Northern Lights Inn, and dinner at the adjacent Dakota Farms restaurant. We went in just as a group of twenty people started arriving for a family birthday dinner. Calvin and I figured that we weren’t going to eat here for quite a while, se we decided to try and find another restaurant in Rugby.

I let Calvin drive, since I had been doing the driving up to then and the autopilot had been doing all the flying for both of us. We got quite a tour of Rugby.

I’ve driven in Rugby before, but the streets are still a mystery. They run into T intersections, cross each other and then disappear, and don’t all lead to downtown. I was navigator, using Google maps to find the restaurants, and was shouting “left!’, “right!”, “watch out!!”, and “where the heck are we?” as Calvin turned left, right, and bumped over streets under repair.

The upshot was that the first bar and grill was closed for renovation, the second was a biker bar and the other alternatives were all fast-food places that closed in ten minutes. We went back to the Dakota Farms, where there was one server on duty and one cook in the kitchen.

We got our food fairly quickly, and I was impressed by the young woman’s calm demeanor, as she tirelessly and efficiently served everyone and refilled their drinks. Calvin is the extrovert of the pair of us and struck up a conversation with the server after everyone was finished and the other people had left.

He complimented her on her grace and professionalism under extreme pressure and asked how old she was. She is fifteen. She was wearing a Rugby FFA shirt, and had the blond hair common among the Scandinavian descendants of the original settler of that region. Listening to them talk, I knew that she would have a wonderful life ahead with that down-to-earth attitude and quiet charm.

We were going to spend the day Wednesday in the area, so we went back to our room, showered and crawled into bed after checking in with Catherine and Julie back home.

North Dakota is pretty flat, so there were no jake brakes outside our room that night.