Category Archives: Transportation

Trot-lining for Skunks

Posted on July 12, 2012 by | 4 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  I appreciate you.

We’ve been blessed with some moisture the past couple of days and the ground’s soft enough I might be obliged to cancel my trip to Kerrville for groceries and cat food.  Not at all sure that car will make it up the hill until things dry enough to give the tires some purchase.

When I went out to turn the chickens loose this morning I found I’d offended a skunk who’d been trying to take advantage of things by digging under the wall of the chicken-house several places.  Because it happens occasionally, and a skunk, or coon will kill every chicken it can corner, I’d laid out chains along the bottoms of the walls with treble-hooks attached.  Evidently this was a new skunk, or [if an old one] it had forgotten the last time it tried this.

Underneath that wall is limestone, most places, but there are a few places were a determined predator could get underneath if it got past the treble-hooks.  This one didn’t.  Left a tuft of hair, a bit of paw-hide and a stink enough to have the chickens overly anxious to get the hell out of Dodge in a hurry. 

Maybe some things are worse than having your life saved.

Incidently, all that erosion control stuff I was doing for a while’s performing a lot better than I expected.  Lots of that cedar’s now buried in silt.  This place must have been losing tons of soil every time it rained for longer than anyone alive has any business remembering.

Damned cattle were eating their seed corn without a thought.  Same as the rest of us.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, Animals, Country Life, Free-ranging-chickens, Solitude, Transportation

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Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air

Posted on July 9, 2012 by | 1 comment

I posted this back in December, 2011, which seems a lot longer ago today than it did then.  But lately I’ve been running the subjects of hydrogen generators around in my mind, nosing around through the search engines about it.  Which led me to remember old Bryce and wonder what ever became of him.

I asked Rich whether he’d ever heard from him and he was happy to report he hasn’t.

Probably it’s fortuitous.  I think if Rich had known how to get in touch with Bryce I’d probably have risked a non-stop two-hour report of what who said to whom at the local restaurant in hopes of bouncing some hydrogen generator ideas I’ve been toying with off him.  Picked his brain about how the company team he was part of handled the heat generated as a by-product.

But it’s more likely I’d never have gotten a word in edgewise to ask.  Bryce wasn’t into listening.  He’d donealready been-there-done-that on everything a person can squeeze into his life and couldn’t imagine whichever part of it was skimming around inside his skull didn’t need spraying across communication efforts.  Life, for Bryce, didn’t have any room for anything much about what hasn’t already happened, with him doing the reporting of it.  No point in anyone attempting to say anything during the process because he wasn’t about to listen to it anyway.  He was too busy thinking about what he was going to say next.

Nice guy, though.  Harmless if a person had a book handy to read while he was talking through his outpourings.

The only difference between Bryce and talk radio was that Bryce wasn’t trying to sell anything.  Well, that and the fact talk radio listeners say, “Ditto!” without interrupting.

Ditto, Bryce.

Old Jules 

December 30, 2011 by | 20 Comments | Edit

A few years ago my friend Rich asked me if I’d be interested in talking with an older guy in his late 70s who was experimenting with hydrogen generators for retrofitting onto his vehicle. I wasn’t looking into hydrogen generating, but I’m a curious sort of fellow. I didn’t require any persuading. I just told Rich to give Bryce my phone number. About a week later he called me.

Turned out Bryce had spent his career as chief mechanic for the Ford and General Motors Speed Teams, or Racing Teams, some such thing. He was part of the group that put together the hydrogen powered vehicle that established a record for the highest speed ever recorded for an internal combustion engine driven automobile.

Using what he learned from all that, Bryce had created a series of hydrogen generators for his own vehicle, trying to maximize efficiency and deal with other shortcomings with the system. He did it all from salvaged materials. Heck of an interesting guy the first few times we talked. I wish I’d taken notes and drawn sketches of what he told me.

At first during our acquaintance Bryce and I had conversations. Two people brainstorming things he was doing, and I was doing. But gradually the hydrogen generating conversational possibilities ran down. Bryce was calling me every day or so, telling me all manner of things I didn’t want to hear, such as what the waitress in the cafe where he took coffee and meals said to him, what he said back, what she said back. Or what other customers said to him and what he said back. Or his brother.

Bryce would call, ask how I was, not wait for an answer, and talk non-stop for an hour, two hours. I could put the phone down, go feed the chickens or make a cup of coffee and come back to the phone without him noticing. Sometimes I’d tie a bandanna around my head attaching the phone to my ear and read a book waiting for him to wind down.

This went on for months. I didn’t know what to do about it, except straight-on explaining to him that this wasn’t conversation and wasn’t a source of joy to me. I mentioned it to Rich, and it turned out Bryce was doing the same thing to him.

Finally, as gently as I could manage, I interrupted one of his monologues and explained the problem, as I viewed it. I told him I liked him, that I’d enjoy conversations with him, but that I didn’t want to hear the same stories over and over about people at the restaurant, his brother, etc. That if we were going to continue having communications there’d need to be exchanges and some level of concern as to the amount of interest the other person had in hearing it.

Despite my attempt to soften the words, Bryce got his feelers hurt badly by this. He never called again, which I preferred to the alternative of things continuing as they were.

Sometime a few months later Rich finally got his fill of it and tried the same tactic on Bryce, with the same result. He was more reluctant to do it than I’d been, because he felt sorrier for Bryce than I was willing to allow myself to indulge.

Bryce came up in conversation between us a couple of days ago. Turns out it’s been almost exactly a year since Rich has heard from him, and a few months more than that for me. We wondered aloud how he was doing.

But neither of us is willing to bite the bullet and call him to find out, on pain of maybe starting the whole mess again.

I began this post figuring on saying some things about hydrogen generators but drifted off into Bryce and his problems. Maybe some other time, the hydrogen generators.

Old Jules

1 Comment

Posted in 2012, Communication, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Transportation, Trucks

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The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test

Posted on June 29, 2012 by | 13 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

Maybe the reason I lured myself into allowing my hopes to include that 1977 C60 school bus was just a time warp slipped in briefly.  Fond memories have a way of coming back to haunt folks as they approach the jumping off place, I reckons.

A million years ago, Back Just Before Hippies Were Invented, summer, 1964, when KoolAid was just KoolAid and acid was still just something to excite a strip of litmus paper, I had my first experience driving a school bus.

As described in the post linked above, I’d gotten out of jail in Rochester, NY, walked halfway down Ohio, been picked up by a taxicab going deadhead back to Terre Haute, Indiana, after taking a drunken businessman to Columbus, OH, to see his estranged wife and kids.  He left me on a street corner in Terre Haute, where I dodged beer bottles thrown by kids the rest of the night.

Mid-morning a yellow school bus pulled across the intersection where I was standing, a car pulling a trailer pulling in behind it.  Loma Linda Academy painted on the side.  The door popped open and the driver yelled, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

I had a middling amount of experience driving dump trucks and such when I was younger, and I was hungry enough for a ride to lie through my teeth.  “Sure thing.  Nothing to it!”  He vacated the driver seat, I took it, and we said goodbye to Terre Haute.

Turned out he was a Baptist minister moving his family to Las Vegas, New Mexico.  He’d contracted with the manufacturer to take the bus to Loma Linda, California, figuring he’d stack the seats in back, load up his belongings in the empty space, and get the hauling expenses paid for by delivering the bus.

Rick Riehardt was his name.  Young, 30ish man with a nice family.  One of several Baptist ministers I’ve met in my life I came to respect and was able to enjoy their company.  But a menace behind the steering wheel of a school bus.

The rear of the bus was loaded with his belongings, forward of that, loose seats stacked, with about half the seats still bolted to the floor, up front.  Rick had a five-gallon jug of KoolAid and a cooler loaded with Bologna sandwiches behind the driver seat.  He was “a loaf of bread and a pound of red” sort of man when it came to eating on the road.

We struck up a salubrious acquaintance as we motored along in that bus, picking up other hitch-hikers as we came to them.  Enough, at times, to fill the intact seats in the bus.  College kids, soldiers on leave or in transit, bums, beatniks, people who didn’t care to admit where they’d been, where they were going. 

One kid who’d just been down south working with SNCC and marching with emerging civil rights movement, marching, getting beat-hell-out-of by redneck sheriffs, getting treated like a stinking step-child by a lot of the blacks he was supporting.

The hitchers rotated on and off the bus as we drove southwest, Rick and my ownself being the only constants, me being the only driver.  We hadn’t gone far before Rick began cajoling me to drive the bus on to California after he’d unloaded it in Las Vegas, re-installed the seats, and he’d leave the family behind.  But I was headed for Portales, New Mexico.  Figured on getting off and heading south at Santa Rosa, well east of Las Vegas.

Eventually I agreed to it because I didn’t think there was a chance in hell he’d get the bus to California in one piece driving it himself.  That, and I was probably hallucinating on KoolAid and bologna sandwiches by that time.

We parted as friends, him offering to buy me a bus ticket back to Portales, me insisting I’d ride my thumb.  Caught a ride in Needles, CA, with four drunken US Marines in a new Mercury Station Wagon on 72 hour pass.  Headed for Colorado Springs.  All they wanted from me was for me to stay sober and awake watching for Arizona Highway Patrol airplanes.  Every time I dozed they’d catch me at it and threaten to put me back afoot.

We made it from Needles, CA, to Albuquerque alive, about 1100 miles in 12 hours.  I was ready for a rest.  Crawled into a culvert and slept until I had my head back on straight enough to stick out my thumb again.

Rick and I used to exchange post cards for a decade or so, but I lost track of him somewhere back there.  Never lost track of the KoolAid and bologna, though.  I still keep it around in my head in case I ever need it.

Old Jules

13 Comments

Posted in 1960's, Adventure, hitch hiking, New Mexico, NM, Portales, Relationships, Transportation, Trucks

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Mandatory Liability Insurance and the School Bus

Posted on June 28, 2012 by | 4 comments

Neglected to mention, for anyone interested, I talked to the insurance folk about mandatory liability insurance should the bus jump into my life.  Turns out every one of those seats is a potential injured passenger with an axe to grind.  Insuring it with the seats intact is out of the question.

But my insurance carrier doesn’t insure school busses converted to RVs, or whatever rhymes with an RV this would become if I do what I’d planned doing with it.  The lady would have to search out a special insurance company to provide coverage, and while it would be cheaper than a bus, cheap is relative.

Her wild guess without having chased it down is that a year of insurance on it will be in a range I’d consider outside mine.

If the guy who has it drifts down into something I’d be willing and able to meet, getting tags on it will be costly, insurance probably worse, rendering it a yoke around my neck I couldn’t reasonably expect to carry.

I asked the I Ching what it thought about the matter and the hexagram it gave was ‘Dangerous Depths’, with changing lines advising caution.

Which, of course, I am.  Cautious, I mean.  Dangerous depths don’t bother me but I like to keep my altitude below me, as opposed to above me.

Everything else being equal.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival, Texas, Transportation, Trucks

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Loaded With Extras

Posted on June 23, 2012 by | 11 comments

I take the view the only really necessary parts on a vehicle are:

  1. Engine and drive train,
  2. wheels of some description
  3. Steering device
  4. Throttle
  5. Someplace to sit or stand.

This car is loaded with extra parts.  For instance, notice that hood with all the paint on it and the little hump.  That hump was caused sometime when something flew off the engine and instead of heading off somewhere the driver wouldn’t have to deal with it, bounced it back into the engine compartment.

Paint is a definite useless extra, and the hood doesn’t do anything except make it more difficult to get to the engine.  Same as that windshield.  Just something else to break.  If the car didn’t have a windshield it wouldn’t need windshield wipers forever wearing out.

Look at all that expensive, useless crap they hang on those cars.  Bumper.  Mirrors, lights.  Just more stuff to go wrong or get knocked off.  Something covering the radiator.

More useless paint, little signs hung all over the place, hubcaps.  Reflectors.

All that stuff on the tires to wear out.  If they’d just wrap the hubs with electrical tap they’d never go flat.  Or make them out of solid rubber so’s a person could wear them all the way down to the axles, or at least the hubs.

Look at all this junk!  Tail lights.  Some kind of weird handle across the trunk.  More little signs.  A back window.  A tail pipe!  A dadgummed tail pipe hanging out there to catch on rocks and deadfall trees.  But most of this extra stuff will take care of itself over time just getting in and out of here. 

Luckily, the brakes are fairly spongy so’s I won’t have to trouble myself with them long.  If I need to stop planned, I’ll just shut down the engine.  Or emergencies, put it into reverse, or parking gear.  Or run it into something heavy.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in Transportation

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Unplanned Protrusions

Posted on June 23, 2012 by | 15 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

A person with his ear to the ground listening for possibilities and interference from the Coincidence Coordinators can find himself in unexpected places, which I did.  Yesterday.

Had to go into town for groceries and animal necessities, but I’d been watching that bus for about six weeks.  Thought it might be time to begin feeling around in the head of the man who owns it. 

We were sitting in the car lot office circling the issue, nobody putting a toe in the water when a Lincoln pulled up in front and a guy got out, shouting, “I put serious stuff up my nose!”  He was shouting it non-verbally, but body language communicates sufficiently sometimes.

He jitterbugged into the office – it was clear he and the owner knew one another – and pointed across the lot to an older model American somewhat small car. 

Tweaker talking a mile a minute:  I’ve got checks out I need to beat to the bank with cash.  Would you buy that car from me for $1400 cash right now?

Owner:  No.

Tweaker:  $1300?

Owner:  No.

This progress worked its way down $100 at a time to $400, the owner nodding negative.  The tweaker paused.  “No?”

Owner:  NO.  I’ve got a cash flow problem here.  When I sold you that car I’d taken it on a trade in.

Tweaker turns to me:  Would you buy it?:

Me:  No.  That ain’t my kind of car.

Tweaker:  Huh.  I guess I’d better try to sell it to someone else then.  I’ll get my stuff out of it.

Tweaker goes out to the Chevi, takes a lot of stuff out of the back seat and carries it over to the Lincoln.  Meanwhile, I’m thinking.

Me to owner:  Would it be any problem for you if I bought that car from him?

Owner:  He bought it from me.  I don’t have anything to do with it now.

So, I got to the car about the same time as the tweaker returned to it, asked him about it.  Keep in mind, he’d talked to me in the office a few minutes earlier, asked if I’d buy it for $400.

Tweaker:  Would you buy it for $1400.

Me, scowling:  No

Tweaker:  $1300?

Me:  No.  Do you remember me?  I was in there with you and him a few minutes ago.

Tweaker:  Sure.  Would you give me $1200?

Me:  No.

We worked our way back down, me assuring him I honestly wasn’t certain I was interested at any price.  So we went over it, looking at everything, listening to the engine, driving it around the parking lot.

Tweaker:  Are you going to buy it?

Me:  You only got down to $600.  We aren’t down to talking about it yet.

Tweaker:  But you haven’t made any offer.

Me:  I’ll give you $400 lock stock and barrel.  No sales tax, no nothing else.

Tweaker:  That’s just the amount I was hoping for.

Turned out the papers from him buying it hadn’t come back from DVM yet, so I sent him off to get whatever was needed to sign it over to me and he left, saying he’d be back there at 2:00 pm.  I went off to a couple of thrift shops and returned at 2:00.  He was nowhere to be seen, so I hung around chewing the fat with the car lot owner until he arrived back and we did the motions of transferring things him jittering and jotting, talking incoherently.  We had a blank form and he signed it, wrote out a bill of sale on a piece of notebook paper.  Barely readable.

The story should have ended there, me coming back here to get Gale to haul me to town to pick it up.  But the tweaker had a lot of dances and fast peter-piper-picked-a-pail-of-pickle-peppers left in him he needed to get out.  Asked me if he should give me $100 back on the car.  No idea why.

Me:  No.  We’re okay. 

Eventually I nudged him friendly out to the Lincoln so he could go take care of the bank.  Went back inside the office shaking my head, made arrangements to leave it in the lot a few hours, or until this morning so’s I could come pick it up.  We all shook our heads at one another, shrugged, shook our heads some more and I was on the road home.

Gale was ecstatic, knowing he won’t be loaning me Little Red anymore for my necessaries.

Me, I’m just tickled the Coincidence Coordinators are so much smarter than me.  When the time comes I’ve figured out I don’t need it I’m comfortable I won’t lose money on it, provided it still runs.  But even as junk I won’t lose much if it comes to that.

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2012, Texas, Transportation

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Pavement on the Road to Hell

Posted on June 8, 2012 by | 12 comments

So.  The  guy who drove this for the summer camp for kids provided more info.

1]  That FalVay living under there is dead.  Probably the big AC inside was Freon 12, which caused it to be useless maybe a decade ago.

2]  They traded up to a bigger bus.

3]  On ‘short’ trips it gets 4-5 miles to a gallon.

4]  It’s got a 2-speed rear-end.  ‘Overdrive’ of the old style.

5]  Engine’s good, sound, ran better on leaded gasoline, but it’s okay.

I concludes:

The car-dealer got this thing free and called it a trade-in.  He’s got nothing in it except an inspection sticker and some touch-up paint.  It’s been sitting on that lot most of a month with a price-tag of $1998,

But I’m guessing after it sits there a while longer a person would want to be careful not to offer him $500 unless he wanted to find himself living in it.

But with gas prices being what they are a few hundred miles to New Mexico could pass itself off as a black hole for money.

Gonna just have to watch and listen on this one.

Meanwhile, couscous turns out to be high priced enough to fight its way out of my diet.

There are some llama-critters down where I turn off the highway I stop and talk to when they’re close to the fence.  Those animals have the prettiest faces, particularly eyes, of any creature on the planet.  If I could afford to get married again, there’s one of them congenial enough I think I might ask.  Never talks back, always just walks over and stares lovingly, admiringly at me while I talk to her. 

It’s been a good many years since I’ve run across a woman did that.  Longer still since one managed to keep it up over the long haul.  Turns out I sort of miss it.

Got a feeling, though, this llama has staying power.

Old Jules

12 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Country Life, Senior Citizens, Transportation, Trucks

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1977 C60 School Bus – Idle Musings

Posted on June 3, 2012 by | 3 comments

Morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Some of you made some good, helpful comments about the last post, and although that bus might never come into my life, my mind’s insisting on playing with the associated problems.

Insofar as the matter of cooling for summer driving, I’m thinking ram-air venturi.  A hole cut at the question-mark, flange installed with a megaphone-like air-catcher-compressor expanding inside the bus.  Water misted from a pressurized pump-up insecticide sprayer as the air expands as it’s released inside the bus.  Rear windows open to pull the cooler air backward through the length of the bus.

I’m thinking for cooling the bus as a dwelling, a thermal syphon arrangement pulling air from the shaded area under the bus, releasing it along the floor, the hole for the venturi open and the windows cracked at the top to pull the cooler air upward from the floor. 

Maybe some sort of misting device inside the bus, also.

I use those pump-up insecticide sprayers anyway for showering now, today, and that one would serve that use when the bus is parked as living quarters.  I’d cap the hole with a PVC cap when the venturi wasn’t in use, weather was cold, or it was raining.

As for heating it winters, I’ve got a number of ideas, some as strange and unlikely as these.  But the cats and I are used to living cold and hard.  What’s bare minimum for us isn’t likely to be much warmer than our ancestors spent their lives living with, uncomplaining.

For cooking meals while driving down the highway I’ll install one of those enclosed propane grilles to sit atop the engine, use waste-heat from the engine to do the cooking, pull it out when I’m ready, slow-cooker-like.  There’s plenty of room under the hood for a cooker capable of handling a banquet.

There’s an old propane refrigerator from a camper I gave Gale 30-40 years ago stored up there I posted a picture of here on an earlier entry, which I’d install.  Those AC shelves will work well, I thinks, as a means of running water lines, gas lines, and electrical wiring.  Out of sight, out of the way, but accessible.

A couple of propane burners on a platform and a Coleman stove oven might be the solution for somewhere to prepare food while camped if I don’t cook outdoors.

I’m thinking LED lighting, assuming I can find it at the right price.

Those pump-up insecticide sprayers are surprisingly useful for all manner of unlikely purposes.  Good for washing dishes, rinsing dishes, showering, all in a severely water-saving mode.  Heat the water, fill one with soapy water, another with clear water, you’re in business.

Thanks for your interest and comments.

Gracias, Jules

3 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Homesteading, Survival, Transportation

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Thoughts on the 1977 School Bus as a Cat House

Posted on June 2, 2012 by | 20 comments

I’ve been scratching under my hat over a number of issues regarding that old school bus as a potential escape route, studying pictures taken last time in town.  Wondering how a person might get around various problems.

One that jumps out immediately is the fact there’s no way of locking the doors, either the front, or the emergency door.  So a person who didn’t fix that problem wouldn’t want to be a sound sleeper.  Or go off out-of-sight of it if he had anything inside he wanted there when he got back.

Another is that no obvious place to mount a spare tire seems to be included in the design. I suppose a person might rig a way to keep one on the roof if there’s no place underneath to hang it. 

Those wheels appear to weigh 75 pounds or more, though, so getting them up there would be a growth experience.

Interestingly, there appears to be an old Volkswagen living underneath there.

Evidently it was retrofitted to power a huge refrigeration air conditioning complex above the rows of seats, both sides.  My thought is that the shelves are nice, but the refrigerator is gonna have to come out.  Maybe the VW engine, too, so’s to make room for a spare tire.

Meanwhile, the windows don’t lock shut and some screens would have to be rigged to keep insects out and provide a disincentive for cats jumping out open windows to explore the highway.

I’ve always wanted something with a lot of switches to try to figure out as I drive along.

Nothing about it, I reckons, that can’t be overcome, but a challenge or two if the thing decides to jump into my life.

[I was watching for a place in here to use the word ‘footfeet’ because it’s such a novel piece of language history involving automobiles.  For the unaware, people used to call the brake, clutch and throttle pedals ‘footfeet’.  But there’s not a lot I can think of to say about the footfeet of this bus.  Hmmm, except,]

The footfeet appear to be intact, adequate and functional.

Old Jules

20 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Country Life, Outdoors, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Senior Citizens, Survival, Texas, Transportation, Trucks, White Trash Repairs

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Taking Off Downwind

Posted on February 18, 2012 by | 21 comments

If it hadn’t been for an old friend who was a pilot telling me I could fly an airplane as cheaply as I could spend an hour on the range practicing with a large-bore pistol every week, I’d probably never have thought of doing it.  But something about the idea grabbed me.

I went out to the Killeen, Texas airport and took a few lessons to find out whether flying was one of the adventures I wanted to give myself this lifetime.  Turned out there was no question in the question.

But being a man of ideas, not much time passed before I decided I could buy an old aircraft and save a lot of the cost of renting one while I learned.  A 1947 Cessna was sitting on the strip with a for sale sign on it, that one at the top of the post, so I bought it.

But finding an instructor to teach me to fly a taildragger cut down a lot of my options.  I ended up with a guy named John Rynertson, who introduced himself by saying he was one of the best pilots around.  He owned a Cessna 120, and John taught me enough to get me started.

But we had a falling out, him not soloing me in a timely manner, me thinking he wasn’t doing so because he wanted to maximize the trainer fees.  One day we landed, me thinking this was the day of the solo, and he sneered I wasn’t ready yet.  We were standing by the airplane, so I climbed inside, started the engine and taxied down to the end of the runway, gave myself my first solo flight, illegal.

John and I didn’t have much truck with one another after that.  I flew that old Cessna without having a ticket allowing me to do it, while he flew his C120 up one day and pulled the wings off it in a snap-roll, killing himself exactly the way a man ought to do if he’s going to pull the wings off a Cessna.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d taken off downwind for the first time.  I couldn’t find another instructor, and I was relocating to another town at the time, where nobody knew me.  So for several years I flew that Cessna, 500+ hours flying time, as though I was entirely legal.  Flew out to New Mexico, over to Savanna, Georgia, sleeping under the wing along the way, with no license to pilot an aircraft.

But eventually word got around the Georgetown Municipal Airport and someone cautioned me the FBO was going to rat me out to the FAA.  I decided it was time to complete my training.  Found an old outlaw pilot to sign me off and made an appointment with the FAA examiner in Austin.

When he looked at my log and saw I had 500 hours he shook his head a longish time.  “I’ve been checking out pilots for thirty years.  Before you the one with the most flying hours I’d ever seen was a guy with 100 hours, and he almost killed me during the check ride.  Couldn’t fly an airplane.”

I grinned at him.  “You care to watch me take it around the patch a few times before we do the check ride?  I’ll get the numbers every time around and turn off by the first taxi way.”

We did the check ride and I flew back to Georgetown legal, for the first time.

Almost felt as though I’d lost something.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules:  Mistakes and Regret? 

Old Jules, what mistakes have you made and regretted?

Previous post about the flying phase: Misplaced Worries

 

21 Comments

Posted in Adventure, Flying, Transportation

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