Palm Springs to Palo Alto

Click here for the route.

Ah, our final day of flying. Mostly retreading over old territory, with a few things to make it more exciting. Given we are in California, weather was not a problem: no rain, no cloud cover, just the threat of possibly, maybe, who knows, thunderstorms happening in the Palm Springs area about 5 hours after our proposed departure time. No worries.

We took off around 10 am, climbed to 8500 ft and were on our way to Palmdale, skirting all those Los Angeles / California fires you've all probably been reading around in the papers. We gave them a wide berth, never getting closer than 20 or so miles to its limits. Still, we were able to see some of it and it looked like this:


The only effect on us that the fires had was to make part of the trip, between Victorville and Bakersfield somewhat hazy, even though visibility was more than 10 miles. Once we were past Bakersfield, the haziness went away and things were hunky dory.

We stopped at Harris Ranch for lunch. It's a good place to go if you like beef. The restaurant and hotel have their own airport, with a long but narrow runway. Both Sharon and I had very good salads (there was beef on mine, so they did not kick us out of the restaurant). A cool thing about landing there was hearing the voice of one of our friends, Wolf, on the radio, who was using the same frequency (but unfortunately at another airport). Still, that was a clear sign that we were getting close to the end of our journey.

After lunch we took off and immediately abandoned any flight plan, opting instead to follow the "traditional" approach to get to Palo Alto from the California Central Valley: point the plane towards Mount Diablo and fly in that direction until you see the San Francisco Bay. Simple and effective. Mount Diablo, by the way, looks like this:

We soon found ourselves on final at our home airport with one landing to go to complete our journey. Getting ready to land was a thrill, there is nothing like seeing the runway of your home airport in front of you. The view for us was like this:


And that was it. We landed, taxied to parking, tied the plane down, hailed a cab and were done with this adventure.