Traverse City, MI

This weekend, Beth & I flew up to Traverse City for a quick getaway. Beth had just finished her job for the school year, and we were headed to the Lansing area for her grandmother's 90th birthday party. Since we were flying up to avoid the 6-7 hours in a car, I was sitting in our living room at home planning the flight, and just for kicks I measured the distance to Traverse City. 134NM. (pause) 134NM!!!! That's only an hour flight in the Diamond! So, we quickly booked a hotel room, and since the weather was good, we decided to stay up here for a day or so. On our flight out of Coshocton, we were surrounded by balloons for the Coshocton Hot Air Balloon races. I circled up and over them, and Beth snapped this nice picture of a hot air balloon off our wing. We then climbed to our cruise altitude and headed for Charlotte, MI (KFPK), a small airport close to Lansing, MI. The air was cool and smooth, and great visibility as we flew quickly up to Toledo. The sunlight glinting off the lake, with some small patches of clouds over Toledo was quite dramatic, and what was really dramatic was the time - only 57minutes to Toledo! Is flying great or what? Look at those smiling faces!

After the birthday party, swimming in the pool, and hobnobbing with Beth's Michigander relatives, we took off again for Traverse City, one of Beth's mostest favoritest summer vacation spots. It is a beautiful area, surrounded by lakes and water, and usually very cleaer blue skies and low humidity in the summer. We stayed at the Grand Traverse Resort, which has a Jack Nicklaus and a Gary Player designed golf course on the grounds. Unfortunately, I will not be losing 3 sleeves of balls in Jack Nicklaus' pinball machine because of time, but maybe I'll get up here sometime in the near future for a round. The flight up from Charlotte was very nice. Clear skies, with some scattered clouds at 7500ft or so. We managed to get right into the inversion layer at 6500ft (it was a fairly hot day), and had smooth air for the ride up. I didn't really feel like climbing to 8500 to get over the layer, since the air was so nice. You can see the twin lakes of Cadillac, MI in the pictures here - very pretty! In the photo with the reflection of sunlight off the lakes, and if you look very closely on the horizon, you can see the shore of Lake Michigan off in the distance. Neato! The airspace was pretty dead up here - nothing much going on as we made our descent into Traverse City. The tower controller gave us a straight-in approach to runway 36 in front of a Lear, winds were 5 kts out of 330, so there were no problems. We taxied up to the gate, and were met by a very helpful representative of Harbour Air, the GA service provider at KTVC. He took us and our baggage to the terminal in a golf cart, and then got us into a rental car with lightning speed. Great service, and very friendly. Oh, and it only took 58 minutes from Charlotte, MI to shutdown at Traverse City.