Santa Teresa to Palm Springs

Click here for the route.

Today was another long day of flying, with two legs of over 2 hours each. What made it easy was the good weather with no clouds, great visibility and no turbulence) all the way. We are also now back in familiar territory, backtracking through our original route.


Again we got to fly close to Mexico. The closest point was at the town of Perto Palomas. It goes all the way straight to the border and the fence. It looks like this:


According to the charts, during this leg we went over the Continental Divide. It didn't look much of a divide to me, but who am I to argue with cartographers, geologists and government charts? A continental divide, by the way, looks like this:


We also flew over Davis Monthan Air Force Base where apparently the Air Force stores a lot of their decommissioned planes. This is what a lot of decomissioned Air Force planes look like:


There are more decomissioned planes in this picture than the Brazilian Air Force has flying.

We trefueled at Marana Regional (the airport where we got the funky van on the way out) in Arizona and then took off for California. Again we got to fly over a lot of nothing. To give you a different perspective on how much nothing there is, let me explain a little differently. Our plane's GPS / moving map always shows the distance and direction from the nearest airport, town or navigation aid so that we can easily report our position to air traffic control. This is displayed on the lower right hand corner of the display. Usually, we are never more than 10 miles away from something. This is what it showed when were flying over nothing (actually it said 45, but by the time I got the camera out we had moved closer):


The same river was there marking the Arizona-California border, only this time it had a name; apparently it is the Colorado River, the same one that goes through the Grand Canyon. Here's what a river with a name looks like:


Now we get to spend a few days at a spa in Palm Springs, resting and eating and drinking until our last leg back home and the end of this adventure.