What started out as a fairly nice day turned to a full thunderstorm by the. The we reached the airport. I was pretty soaked just from filling up the car. Our plans for a quick flight down the Hudson River and then on to Dallas was out on hold. Still, the opportunity to fly over the Hudson along Manhattan doesn't come every day so we wait it out.

ForeFlight gives us real time radar so after a good hour or two of waiting we see our gap in the storm and jump on the chance to fly to NYC . We'd prepared the flight per the Terminal Area Chart guidelines and knew the tolerances on this route would be small. Johannes was in charge of all the cameras, I'd do the flying and the radios. It was full-on to say the least.

The ceilings were low and the fixed communication points pretty quick after one another. Still, once we were on the route doing the reporting wasn't too complicated. Wow! Flying over the Intrepid aircraft carrier, along all the skyscrapers and of course around the Statue of Liberty was too cool. We did a 360 around the statue, not sure if that was completely legit or not ;-). Maggie's obstacle clearance alarms were going crazy that we were lower than the new World Trade Center construction site. That's a giant building and too think we were maybe a half mile away from it... ridiculous. Returning to Westchester was in light rain but no problems as we were still quite VfR. Our window to do that flight was tight, but it worked perfect . It was a really cool thing to do on my birthday, that's for sure!

After filing an IFR plan at the FBO, we were off again. We picked a small field in rural Kentucky, Powell in Danville, to refuel. We had lots of cotton ball clouds below us and some build-up we had to navigate through and around, but it wasn't too bad. Unfortunately we arrived after the field office closed, so no courtesy car and nothing nearby to eat. From there it was VFR to Addison and home in Dallas! We got in around 10:30pm and promptly had some of Mom's great home-cooking.

Routings:
For the flight from KHPN ( Westchester, NY) to Danville, KY (KDVK) I filed: IGN V58 LHY V106 JST IHD V119 JPU YRK HYK at 10,000'. What clearance delivery gave us was: West4 RV SAX V249 SBJ V30 ETX V39 MRB V166 ESL V4 HYK DVK DIR at 8,000'. I guess you. Don't always get what you ask for ;-). Fortunately I really like jotting down clearances nowadays.

For Danville to KADS Addison, TX we just went VFR with flight following the whole way. Each flight was a bit more than 4 hours.