Yesterday, I flew with two friends from my school who live in the area. We went for an extended bay tour, departing from Palo Alto, overflying SFO Airport, San Francisco, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge... then we continued north to Petaluma for a quick touch and go... and finally straight to Point Reyes before coming back to PAO via the shore line.

Flying the G1000 is just fantastic, traffic awareness, moving map, integrated radios, in flight weather (metars, cloud coverage...), and even XM Satellite Radio :)

Petaluma was really crowded... I was expecting an empty traffic pattern, but there were lots of airplanes all over the place... That was probably because there was almost no wind and no turbulences, which is not a frequent occurence at Petaluma. On our way home, I was monitoring Norcal, and we kept hearing airplanes asking for flight following to Petaluma... At some point, we heard something like:

Airplane: "Cessna 123K, request flight following to Petaluma"
Norcal: "Who isn't today?" :)

Another thing I like about the 172SP is the autopilot. It comes really handy when transitioning through SF Class Bravo to leave time for traffic spotting and listening to the controllers... and also, when used in NAV mode, you are sure to go directly to a point, and not wander around your desired track :)

Unfortunately, I couldn't keep the track for this flight... My 96C was in the back, over my flight gear, and couldn't even get a fix from there... (because of the high wings I suppose...)Too bad it doesn't have a better GPS receiver in there... my $50 bluetooth receiver works much better...