Tuesday night - where are we now??

Linda is in her hotel room posting photos, but I thought I'd update in the meantime. So where are we spending the night? In Hays, Kansas! After we landed at St Joseph's and had lunch, we waited until about 6pm then filed IFR to Hays. Again, Hays is far enough South and West to be out of the weather associated with the low; and the very high winds were forecast to die down in the late evening right about the time we planned to get there. Linda flew us at 6000 feet, and at first we did spend quite a lot of time in a calm cloud layer, but as the flight wore on and we got further West, the clouds thinned out and disappeared, leaving a beautiful crystal clear blue evening flying over the rolling Kansas countryside, which was a lovely jewel bright shade of green due no doubt to all the rain. We passed the town of Russell, and gave a shout out to Barbara's better half of the same name. Linda sang a couple of songs, always a sign that she is enjoying the flight, and quite lovely for the rest of us. We landed at Hays around 9pm just before sunset, with the winds dying down right on schedule, and the last treat of the day was that they let us drive the airport courtesy car into town to our hotel. Many small regional airports keep cars that they loan to incoming pilots for a couple of hours or a day. At the larger airports they might be new cars, but at the smaller airports they can be pretty much anything, cars with thousands of hours that have seen better days but are somehow kept running. The airport car at Hays is a 20 year old powder blue Caprice that steers like a boat, and I had lots of fun driving it especially when our guide (friends of Linda Street Ely who came out to meet her) took us onto the interstate, as I wasn't sure we'd make interstate speeds, but the car did very well. I do love airport cars.