Danville to Waynesburg

Click here for the route.

We made it! We are finally at our intended destination, Waynesburg, PA! Getting here was an interesting.

After breakfast with our hosts in Danville, we started checking the weather. Visibility was good throughout our intended route, 10 miles or more. The cloud cover, however, kept changing from 1900 ft to 4500 ft to 6000 ft. Anything above 3000 ft was ok for the trip. It would keep us low, but at legal heights above ground and beneath clouds. So we waited, checking the weather every 30 minutes or so.

Around noon the clouds were reported between 3000 ft and 6000 ft, with a few scattered around 2500 ft, so we decided to give it a try. We picked a route that would keep us near airports with automated weather reporting so that we could always use the radio to figure out what was ahead. Our plan was to keep going as long as the clouds ahead were high enough and to land at the nearest airport if the weather worsened. The only bad side of this plan was that we couldn't use flight following, as we wanted to be constantly switching among the different weather reporting stations.

So, with the sandwiches Barb made us safely stowed in the back seat we took off, leveled at 2500 ft and started heading East. About one hour out the cloud cover was such that we could go up to 3000 ft and half an hour later we were up to 3500 ft where we stayed for the rest of the trip.

As we got closer to Waynesburg we saw rain between us and our airport, the weather's last valiant attempt to keep us from getting our destination. Visibility got worse than the 10 miles we've had until then, but not enough to be a problem. By the way, the weather's last valiant attempt to stop us looked like this:


What the weather didn't know, though, was that we had borrowed Wolf's Garmin 496 GPS, with satellite weather information, and were prepared for it. We knew it was coming, we knew where it was going, and mostly importantly, how to get around it. Thanks, Wolf!

And finally we were there, overflying Waynesburg on the way to the airport at the other end of town. We overflew Rich and Linda' s (Sharon's sister) house and they actually stepped outside to wave at us. Here is what their waving at us looked like:


Calm winds made the landing straightforward. We parked the plane, tied it up, removed our luggage and were officially in Pennsylvania. This is what we look like when we are officially in Pennsylvania:


And now we rest here for a few days before starting our trek back home.

By the way, after we landed the clouds disappeared and the sky became a nice, peaceful blue.