Bruno, a friend from work had planned a flight to Santa Rosa airport, about 70 nautical miles north of Palo Alto.
The plan we made was that I meet him and his friend Mike at Santa Rosa for lunch.

They flew together in Mike's awesome Pulsar, a light sport aircraft and I joined them in a Cessna 152.
The weather we had that day was perfect, the weather briefer told me nothing was going on, expect the high temperatures.

After my preflight, I took off at around 12:15pm and asked a Class-B transition directly to the north of San Francisco.
The flight went alright, altough two things happened. First, San Carlos tower couldn't catch my transponder signal... That was clearly a problem and they couldn't let me go through the Class B airspace like that... I asked them to circle a couple of minutes west of 
Highway 101 until my sleepy transponder wakes up !
While I was circling, he told me he got my signal from time to time, but that it was unstable...
After 5 minutes of circling, they could finally catch me on the radar and I was cleared to Norcal that in turn, cleared me through Bravo airspace.

Second thing, my plan was to climb up to 6500 feet to find some fresh air... but the 152 was getting kind of hot during the climb, so I asked norcal to remain at 4500 feet for a while to lower the rpm and cool the engine down...
The rest of the flight went without a glitch. There was no marine layer to block me from seeing the ocean, and although the air was very hot, it was very calm...
I arrived at Santa Rosa after approximately 1 hour of flight and rushed to the FBO where Bruno and Mike were waiting for me.

On the tarmac, we met with Saket, another NVIDIA employee who was doing his cross country flight. He was on his way back to Palo Alto in a Cessna 172. Unfortunately for him, he couldn't start his engine; the starter wouldn't crank the propeller... Since none of us was experienced enough to hand prop his plane, there wasn't much we could do to help him.
Everything went fine for him though, his instructor came to help him in the afternoon and he hand propped the plane.

Since the restaurant at Santa Rosa was closed, we decided to fly to Napa to have lunch. Flying together from the same departure point to the same destination, couldn't go without some formation flying !
We decided to meet up at 3500 feet over an old navy airfield next to Santa Rosa (Santa Rosa NAS). I took off before them and went straight to the rendezvous point.
This meeting point was just perfect, I wanted to check out this old airfield. It’s now closed and I always wondered how it looked like from above. It was still entirely visible in Flight Unlimited 2 but nowadays, people have built houses and all sorts of constructions on it... Really a sad view :(

After a few minutes of waiting for them, I heard Mike talking on the Air to Air frequency (123.45Mhz) and I started looking for the white Pulsar.
I found them over the Highway 101 and Bruno took control of Mike's plane to execute his crazy maneuvers :)
I continued straight ahead and after a few seconds, they were on my tail, but not too close though.
That was really cool; formation flight is really a thrilling thing !
We flew in formation for 5 minutes or so before breaking it up and contacting Napa Tower. The ATIS at Napa was reporting a temperature of 40 degrees :)
We landed and met at the terminal in front of the restaurant where we rushed to get some fresh air!

While at the restaurant, just like at every place I've been with Mike, a woman came to us and asked what kind of plane was Pulsar :) This bird sure attracts everyone's attention !

After lunch, Mike went back to Tracy and I headed back to Palo Alto. It didn't go smooth for me at the beginning of this last flight. I experienced my last glitch of the day at runup in Napa. When I checked the magnetos, I had a big drop on the right one... I waited a while, but nothing changed... I still had a drop in RPM... I decided to go back to the terminal and taxied back while watching Mike and Bruno taking off in Pulsa 9 0 Lima Papa...

Once stopped, I called the front desk to ask them what I could do... She told me that I could try running the engine at 2000RPM for a minute of so and retry the magneto check. I tried and it worked. Since it was hot, I probably didn't mixture enough the engine during taxi and this might have left some things on the ignition system...

I could then fly back safely to Palo Alto in 45 minutes of flight around Oakland.

What a great day... let’s hope fore more like that!

You can check out the entire gallery here!

During the trip to south California, we stopped in a place I really wanted to go to. It might be stupid, but it’s a small park on Sepulveda Boulevard, in Los Angeles, next to a In n Out burger…

Nothing interesting, really… except this park is located right under the approach path of the runway 24R of Los Angeles International Airport.

It will certainly be familiar to those who visit Airliners.net regularly. Lots of awesome shots on the site were taken at this place.

It’s great for practicing plane spotting. If you miss one, another one will be over your head in no time!

I thought it was easy, but they are coming in fast and it’s hard to match the motion of the plane… As you can see in the gallery, most of the pictures are blurry, the airplanes are not in the center of the frame and I either zoomed too much or not enough...

It was really cool to be there, it was one of the things I had to do… One of them was flying in California, another was seeing LA… There are many others, but I will keep them to myself :-)

Click here to view the complete gallery

Yesterday I flew one of the club's Archers for some touch and goes at Palo Alto. Sadly this aircraft didn't have enough room to put the camera on the dashboard, so I came up with an alternative way of filming my landings... Putting the camera on the right seat and filming the cockpit and my actions!

I'm glad I did this, the video is quite interesting to watch. You can see my hands moving and especially how the left hand moves to counter act the effect of the turbulences during the approach...

It's funny how this hand can land an airplane considering how dumb it is compared to my right hand... (I'm right handed).

The touch down is approximately at 1 minute in the video, when you hear the landing gear sound and I pull the yoke all the way back.

Have a look at the video and let me know what you think !

Click here to go to the video page, today's video is the last one in the list (Touch Palo Alto Cockpit)

Alright, it’s been a week since I’ve been back from my road trip with Julie from Santa Clara to San Diego… It’s time I write a few lines about what how it went :)

Saturday:
Since we didn’t want to drive all the way back from San Diego to here, we decided that we would rent a one way vehicle and fly back.

The car we rented was a Chrysler Pacifica. I had not planned to rent such a big vehicle, but once at the rental office, when I told them I wanted a car with cruise control, they said that they only had that for one way rentals…


So we went for it. I paid a little extra for that but at least we had a nice car !
We started the trip at 11 am, and headed to Santa Cruz, then Monterey, and straight to the Highway 1, that follows the Pacific Coastline. It was just great ! The road is kind of long, but the view was awesome. We where lucky and had great weather with just a few clouds here and there but they added to the dramatic point of view we had over the Pacific Ocean !

We stopped in the afternoon in a town called Lucia where we ate a delicious sandwich. This restaurant in the middle of nowhere had free wifi ;-)

After this one hour pause, Julie took turn and drove all the way to San Luis Obispo. The rest of the road was pretty common there. We didn’t want to spend too much time here and drove straight to Santa Barbara. We arrived at 7pm and parked in next to the pier.

I found a nice trick to find interesting points to see in the cities we visited. Each time, I took a look at my GPS screen, zoomed out, showed all the details, and we went wherever it was full of little dots (points of interests, restaurants…) It always worked !

We went for a little promenade and ate in a fish restaurant on the pier.

We then drove to Camarillo where I had booked a hotel via Expedia.com. We couldn’t find anything cheap in Santa Barbara so we went to an offset city :-)

The hotel was alright, expect for the morons in the morning that reminded me of why I hate just anyone that owns a motorcycle… They don’t freaking care about anything but their selves!
There were these ridiculous bikes parked right in front of our room, and they decided for some reason that it was a great idea to let the engine warm for 15 freaking minutes! And not a silent engine like on modern cars, nooo it had to make noise! When they left, I was about to go out and let them know my appreciation for their kind… Freaking idiots!

Sunday:
Anyway, we left there at about 9 something… and drove to Santa Monica, next to Los Angeles, following the 101 and then the famous highway 405. Traffic was pretty dense for a Sunday morning. We parked next to the Santa Monica pier and took a walk on the pier and the beach… The beach had some of those Baywatch (Alerte a Malibu) typical yellow cars and lifeguards.

Anyways, we wanted to see some rich people houses, but we didn’t want to buy one of those overly priced stars maps so we entered Beverly Hills in the GPS and looked for a small street we could follow. This lead us to some beautiful houses! We were driving slowly, almost ashamed to slow down the guys in Jaguars, BMWs following us…

In the evening, I called Remy, a French pilot I knew who lives in Santa Monica. He was just returning from a flight to Catalina Island so we decided to meet at Santa Monica Airport. It was pretty cool, we took a drink on a terrace over showing the entire airport!

That night, we stayed at the Comfort Inn in Santa Monica. A little more pricey than the first hotel but still reasonable.

Monday:
The next morning, we drove down to Newport Beach. But before leaving LA, we had to make a stop at Los Angeles International Airport, next to the arrival path of the airplanes… but that’s for another blog post !
So we drove to Newport Beach. I wanted to see this place… those who know me will know why hehe : )
That’s a city south of Los Angeles, in Orange County. Again, my little trick with the GPS worked like a charm and we ended up on the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach. Once there, we were reminded that we had a big car and there were very few parking spots! We cruised for about a half an hour in the streets and finally found something…
We then spent a couple of hours walking on the beach… Funny thing is that is the first place where we encountered what I call the “Dudes”.
These are the typical college kids that you see in the TV shows, movies… I always thought it was exaggerated but let me tell you that it is not ! The TV shows are showing exactly the truth! Or maybe it’s the other way around…

There were some expensive houses on this beach! Most of the houses in front of the sand had open windows where you could see everything inside! One of them had an entire side of the first floor that was sliding over the ceiling, uncovering the living room… Of course, all the furniture inside were probably very expensive and of course there was a huge plasma TV screen…
Even closed houses had their stuff like fancy chairs outside… really surprising…
This reminded me of the time I went on vacation with my parents in the south of France… We had to lock our plastic table and chairs with chains and padlocks so that people wouldn’t steal them… *plastic chairs* for crying out loud!
And in Newport Beach, they were leaving their expensive art design chairs with no chains! :-)

After a fresh salad in an Italian restaurant, we geared up to San Diego, first by following the shore to Laguna Beach to see some more of these beautiful houses, and then we took the Highway 5…

We arrived in San Diego at about 5pm, checked in at the hotel, and again started the location finder with the GPS… It indicated three things, but we wanted to see the ocean so we went to Coronado on North Island. This is apparently a refuge for rich people of San Diego as they were lots of beautiful houses there as well. Again beach, again walk… and again food in a crowded but very good restaurant. Oh yeah, I think after each meal we had during the trip, we wondered what all those French were talking about when they said “You’ll see, you are going to eat very bad food there !” Oh yeah ? Well they couldn’t be more wrong! Some people should really update their stereotypes database, it’s getting old… :)

Tuesday:
That was our last day of the trip. We took a walk in the Gaslamp Quarter and then headed to the third point on the GPS: Pacific Beach !
Now that was CRAZY !
We didn’t really know what to expect, just another beach with people chilling for the 4th of July… but man it was not that AT ALL !
We arrived there at about 12pm… there were some people, but it was still okay… Then when we got close to the beach, we decided it was time to look for a parking spot… and 45 minutes later we found one! Man that was starting to be annoying… Every street we went in were completely packed with parked cars ! Not even a single free parking spot!

The one we found was at about 30 minutes walk time from the beach… But what the hell, we had a spot… We started walking towards the beach and stopped in a restaurant for a salad.
We saw a lot of people walking towards the beach… Among these people, lots of “dudes” and little Paris Hilton wanabees… you know with the bathing suit top, a little light colored skirt and of course, oversized sun glasses !
Spooky…
After our meal, we walked to the beach and we were stunned by the amount of people that were on there! It was packed with college students drinking and having barbecues under tents… We walked along the beach for about 20 minutes without seeing the end of the crowd ! There were lots of people there !
You can get a pretty good overview of what it looked like in the gallery with the 180 degree picture I took !
That was really something interesting to live !

While we were on the beach, a dude and his girlfriend approached us, they were wondering if Julie and I were Swedish or something… (The blonde hair must have set him off a bit)
We got to talking and I don’t know why but he ended up talking to me about god, and if French people were very religious… Then we switched to stereotypes, and apparently, French people are very popular now as Car Burner! Yeah! :-/

Anyway… It was time to go home, and we walked for 30 minutes back to the car, hoping to make someone happy by leaving our spot… but no one showed up… we made an anonymous parking spot donation! How nice of us… :-)

Panoramic view of the beach

Well the rest of the trip is pretty common, car rental return, random price on the receipt if you add all the additional charges and fees... flight back home on a Southwest Airlines 737, and taxi-ride back with a crazy Pakistani guy driving recklessly on the 101 :)

Nice trip, when is the next Holliday already?

See all the pictures in the Gallery

Some Satellite / Birds Eye View of the location we visited:

- Hotel in Santa Monica (Sunday)
- Santa Monica Pier (Sunday)
- Santa Monica Airport (Sunday)
- Newport Pier (Monday)
- Coronado - North Island (Monday)
- Crystal Pier - Pacific Beach (Tuesday)

 Okay, that is way more important that actually writing what we did... I just wrote a little piece of code to export the track from my PDA-GPS to KML files. It's about 29000 points !

Not all the track is there. It only starts in Los Alamos, at about 6pm on saturday, but the rest is there, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, and on the pic on the right, the 45 minutes of desperate search for a parking spot in San Diego (Pacific Beach)!

You can download the track file by clicking here!

Happy Landings

Two intensive days I just lived ! I won't go into much details cause I'm kinda lazy tonite...

Sunday was spent in Los Angeles/Santa Monica/Hollywood... We had a lot of fun there :)

Today we drove down the coast with a little stop for lunch in Newport Beach, then continued to Laguna Beach and San Diego where we spent the evening on North Island/Coronado...

Lovely place !

 Here's what I can see as I'm typing this very message :)

Julie and I are on our way to South California via Highway 1 !

We stopped for lunch in Lucia, on the Pacific Coast ! Can it get better than this ??