A Journal, with Pictures

July 9 and 10

We fly out of Gold­en and head to Kalispell to clear cus­toms. We refu­el, grab lunch-to-go and are off for Pierre, SD where we will spend the night. We fly over our last range of moun­tains east of Kalispell and then over the rugged bad lands, then ranch coun­try, and final­ly farms. Pierre turns out to be a very clean and neat state cap­i­tal city and a good place to lay over. The next morn­ing we are in the air by sev­en forty five. We have to dodge south of some thun­der­storms to Moline for a quick refu­el. We are in the air in thir­ty min­utes and on our last leg. With about a hour and a half to go, we get a alter­na­tor fail­ure light and go through the emer­gency pro­ce­dure and shut down that part of the sys­tem, and con­tin­ue home. We land unevent­ful­ly and fin­ish a great trip with just a lit­tle excite­ment to remind us that it has been a great adven­ture. In total we have flown forty six point sev­en hours and trav­eled six thou­sand four hun­dred miles.

It turned out to be the adven­ture we had hoped for, maybe even a lit­tle more.

We did it!