We left Bay area early Friday afternoon heading to Truckee to pick up the gliders (Matt’s LS4 & my club’s G102) on our way to Parowan. By the time we picked up the gliders and hit the road again it was 6:30PM.

 

We hit I-50 shortly after and started to realize why they call it “The loneliest road

After a quick breakfast and reading email, we hit the road again heading for Ely and then on to Parowan.

 

We stopped at Ely to pick up beer (after all you can’t have a soaring safari if you don’t have beer!). We also dropped by the airport and ran into Carl Herold. After a bit of catching up with

Our goal for the trip was doing our first 300Km out & return flight for our gold and diamond goal, we also had a stretch goal of doing a 500Km flight to claim our diamond distance.  Originally the plan was to fly locally on the first day and slowly push the limits on the following days. However,

The forecast looked very much like the day before. We decided we give the 500Km task a try. The task was set for Parowan-Mt Pleasnt-Richfield-Salina-Parowan for a total of 516Km.

 

Unfortunately we didn’t get airborne early enough (didn’t I mention this is the story of my life?!). This time I knew

By now we were pretty exhausted.  12.7 hours of flying in two days. I just got a new appreciation for contest pilots where they do this kind of flying for a whole week or longer!

 

We decided to take it easy today and do a sight-seeing from the air. Rolf graciously accepted to be our aerial tour