Rock Hill, SC

The weather was nice for a trip on Thursday down to Rock Hill, SC, although somewhat hazy. We took off around 7:30AM and headed south to Rock Hill with a nice 15-20kt tailwind at our backs. You can see the morning haze from 5500ft as we flew over south towards the Ohio River. The last time that I had made this trip, the weather was phenomenal - over 100 mile visibility. Today was not a 100 mile day....we could realistically only see about 35-40miles, but it was still beautiful. Things cleared up as we headed past Charleston, WV and I'm always struck by the endless ridges of the Appalchians as they run past the Virginia border. I think that the morning haze gives them an air of mystery...like Tokien's Misty Mountains....
After we had our business meetings and played a little golf (supplier relations, you know), we grabbed a quick bite at Steak N' Shake, and headed back to the excellent terminal/FBO at Rock Hill. For all you transient aviators, Rock Hill is really a top-notch airport, with great service. I talked to the line worker that was rolling up red carpets and asked him what it took to get the "red carpet treatment". He laughed and said "Oh, it just depends on what mood I'm in -but seriously, you can call Unicom and request it." I'm guessing that the typical Cherokee or Diamond owner doesn't rate for automatic red-carpet - maybe the Pilatus or Piper Meridian owner, but it was nice to know it's available for my next grand entrance. We taxied out to runway 20 and took off, keeping a close eye on the Charlotte Class B airspace. We then headed directly into the sun, and realized that the forest fire TFR west of Charlotte was real and appropriate! Visibility (as evidenced by the below photo) was horrendous. We were really glad to have the Traffic Awareness System (TAS) on the G1000 - it was pretty tough to pick out other planes through the glare and haze.

It was smoky for the first 45 minutes of the flight as we climbed out over the mountains, and then as we crossed the Virgina border, things cleared up slightly, but it was still pretty hazy. Because we had elected to play a round of golf, we were getting back a little on the late side, but that just gave us an opportunity to see a beautiful mountain sunset from the air!
Here you can see the joys of having real-time, in-cockpit weather information via XM weather. There was a line of thunderstorms heading southeast over the Coshocton area, but we were able to monitor lightning strikes, cell movement, and check all the local METARs and winds while enroute. This amount of information at your fingertips to truly indispensible, and really helps you to better make safe flying decisions. We had flight following ask us if we were VFR, because they were worried about us at our location, but we were just fine and knew exactly where the weather was with our G1000. It was a good cross-country trip.