Lunch in Livermore

Today's flight was actually very tiring, considering that we only went to Livermore and back. For one thing, it was a plane I hadn't flown before, so I always do an extra careful preflight. For another thing, my sister Shilpa and her fiance (and my good friend) Bud were with us, and they had many questions. It was great, it really gave me an opportunity to teach them a lot of what I'd learned, and frankly to remember some details that are generally..not forgotten, but compartmentalized..after the checkride.

It was really fun for me to take them up, as they are among the (many) people who expressed some consternation about flying in small planes. Afterwards, they said they had a great experience and gave every indication that they'd have no problem going up again, which is a good sign!

The flight itself was pretty uneventful except that the visibility was lower than I'd been used to going in. It was listed at 10SM. My yardstick has been that if I couldn't see the hills to the east of Fremont (probably about 20SM away) I wasn't going, at least not in that direction. Today, I could barely see the outline of the hills, and I'd cancelled flights in these conditions before. But today we went, and it was fine. So I have a new, lower personal minimum for visibility, which in this case I think is a good thing.

The only other eventful part was trying to find my way around Livermore ground. I basically wasn't totally prepared and kind of blew it, and the controller kind of handed me my hat at first, but then helped me out. I do need to do better at studying ground diagrams before going off to new airports.

Beeb's at Livermore is excellent, by the way.