Day 2 - Wendover, Nevada to Kimball, Nebraska

The flight today was the longest leg of the eastbound trip - 481nm (553 miles) and a planned duration of 3 hours and 15 minutes.  Ordinarily I would have left early, but the weather forecast for my destination, Kimball Nebraska, was extremely windy until late afternoon.  So I didn't depart until 10:45am which was a compromise.   As a result of departing that late I had 45 minutes of turbulence at the end of the trip but the landing at Kimball was uneventful.   I did a low pass to check out the landing strip, and then came back around and landed.  No one minded because No One Was There.

As you can see from the pictures, Kimball Nebraska, population 2500, has a nice clean well kept airport with quite inexpensive aviation fuel, but no people and no airplanes. https://goo.gl/photos/R4V3sfZjSXg2zGHT7   

They do have corn, growing across the street, and apparently they have missile silos.  A lot of them.  The big city park across the street from my motel has a decommissioned missile as the central monument.  No bronze soldiers on horses here - - And the Kimball Motel is just what I hoped for - - wonderful friendly owner who picked me up at the airport, and a comfortable room within walking distance of the center of the town.   One thing about flying - - when you get there (quickly) you are then walking (slowly).

Just a few words about SOME of what goes on in the cockpit during the flight, for those who are interested.  By the time I board the aircraft I have packed away all my bags, done a thorough walk around, checked the oil and gas, tires, landing gear and propeller.  In the seat next to me I have the flight plan, which for today, was Wendover to Bonneville to Cevar to Ogden to Evanston to Fort Bridger to Rock Springs to Medicine Bow to Kimball.  I have this printed out, and also loaded on my tablet navigation app, and loaded into the airplane GPS.  

In addition I have my headset, my cell phone, my spare batteries, sun glasses, reading glasses, snacks, water, pen and pencil, paper, usb cables, audio cable, music player, navigational charts, aircraft owner's manual, GPS reference manual, and napkins.  This trip I have an organizer that I'm hanging on the copilot seat to keep everything where I can find it, except at the end of the trip I dropped the music player under the seat somewhere so I need to find that tomorrow.

For 90% of the trip I am in contact with ATC.  I request traffic advisories along the route and they will tell me if there is another aircraft near me -- near both my position and my altitude.  That means listening to them talking to everyone, in case they talk to me.  ATC controllers just work a certain region of airspace, so every half hour or so they ask me to contact the next controller along my route.

Today I had the music player hooked into my headset, which is designed to mute the music whenever I am receiving or transmitting a call.  It was groovy and I enjoyed singing loudly in the cockpit where no one can hear me!

Periodically I stretch my legs, lift my bottom off the seat, yawn, twist around and then settle back down to music, the incredibly beautiful panorama, and my turkey jerky.  It's heaven!