Day 8
Sunday, September 4th

So we woke up on Sunday and wanted to clean up the car before returning it because just didn't want to return it all covered in dust (inside and out) and get some weird "cleaning fee" charge or something.

While at the car wash, I heard back from my buddy Johnny in Oklahoma and he suggested we stop there and stay for the evening. It would give us a nice place to stop on the way to rest up before completing our trip back to KC. I did still want to stop in Sedona, Arizona on the way because of how epic the approach into this airport looks.

We headed to the Whiteman airport and I worked on getting the plane ready to go and all of our stuff loaded while Kamera took car of coordinating the rental car pickup. We ended up getting off the ground at 11am Pacific time.

About three hours later we were landing in Sedona with plans to continue on to Stafford Airport in western Oklahoma to crash at Johnny's house.

I was a bit nervous for this approach because I keep reading about the crazy mountain turbulence and updrafts when flying into the airport there. Ultimately I think my approach was good, but I carried just a bit too much speed over the threshold of the runway and my nose wheel pogo'd once.

We got food and topped off with fuel there knowing our leg to Oklahoma would be 5ish hours.

Leaving Sedona, the flight was kinda a pain because we had a headwind and lots of mountain turbulence to deal with the entire flight. Plus it was warm, and managing my engine heat added another thing to deal with as Kamera continued to work the breaker for voltage control. But she took care of it, and this entire trip she's also managed to take many of these great pictures.

So we took off from Sedona at about 4pm prepared for a flight that may last close to 6 hours. I was watching our estimated time in route very closely because with that ETE I would be right at a minimum amount of reserve for this flight (a half an hour).

We climbed up to about 9,500 feet for smooth and cool(ish) air, settled in, and watched the remaining flight time tick down. After an hour or two of flying we got lighter (about 60lbs for every hour of fuel burned) and the air got cooler, so my speed picked up a bunch because of that. Also, the headwind also mellowed out, so things were in the clear as far as the flight time / fuel was concerned. We ended up landing with an hour of reserve so my fuel burn was a little better than expected.

We landed just after 10pm local time, Johnny picked us up, and we went back to his house maybe 20 minutes away. He had already cooked up a bunch of food for us so we had a late dinner and caught up before crashing for the night in his guest bedroom.

Back porch food and drinks.