Palm Springs to Tucson

Click here for the route.

Amazingly enough, we did wake up at 6 AM and by 6:30 were downstairs having breakfast. We did take it too leisurely, though, and by the time the plane was fueled and ready to go it was 8:40 AM. DUATS showed good visibility and moderate winds all the way to Marana Airport, our destination outside of Tucson.

Take off from runway 35, a right turn to the East and we were on our way. There was nothing to see along the way, but there was a lot of it. I've never spent some much time flying without seeing anything. The closest thing to towns were clumps of four, maybe five houses. So, here's what a lot of nothing looks like:



This was our first flight to somewhere outside of California (don't blame us, California is big!), so of course we were excited to cross the CA AZ border. Lucky for us, California planned ahead and made the task easy for us by putting a river there. So, when we were exactly over the border and looked down, this is what we saw:



We were surrounded during most of the flight by military operation areas which were active. Occasionally a fighter had to cross from one area to the next and we would see them flying low and fast beneath us. Way too cool!

The adventure of this leg came somewhere past Gila Bend when we lost GPS signal which we were using for navigation. Not to worry, though, we were backing it up with VORs and just switched to them as our main mode of navigation. Five minutes later the GPS signal returned and everything was back to normal.

Due to our later than desired start we started running into some turbulence, and could see the thermals building up along the route. But soon after that started we were landing at Marana, which apparently is also used to store old planes. As we taxied off the runway we saw a Constellation and I immediately told Sharon she needed to take a picture of it for Marc, a friend of ours who has a "thing" for these planes. So Marc, here it is:




We parked the plane, went to have lunch, observed the cloud buildup in our proposed path to El Paso and decided that we would stay here in nice and comfy Tucson for today and attempt the mountainous leg of the trip tomorrow early morning. A brief stop at the FBO and they gave us not only directions, but let us borrow their crew car for the rest of the day.

A crew car, for those who don't know, is usually a clunker the airport keeps around so that crews that arrive can run into town for a quick meal. Ours was an old van that had some doors that don't lock, a broken cigarette lighter (hence no way to power the GPS), and made strange noises every time we braked. But amazingly, the engine worked and it was a loaner, so we were very happy to get it. This is what it looked like:



After resting a little in our hotel room, and waiting for the heat to abate, we went to explore Tucson. There isn't much to the city, but the desert around it is fantastic! Tall mountains, rolling hills and huge cacti everywhere! Were it not so hot I would have loved to have spent some time trekking through the wilderness. Instead, we sat:


And now it's off to get some dinner and prepare for tomorrow's flight to El Paso.