Trip to The West - Destination Las Vegas

Dear readers, today a new adventure began, I’m currently on a Cessna 172 at 10500’ flying inbound Stephenville, Texas. Last Friday the 20th of November my long time friend Francisco arrived at Orlando to spend a few days with us. We got there and picked him up at the airport on 2 convertible Ford Mustangs which we drove back to the terminal where our Cessnas were parked for our flight back to Daytona. While on the move back to Daytona we got into a conversation about where we should fly to so that Francisco could experience the most of is trip. The route we decided upon after Francisco’s insistance shall take us to the West into the great american Desert and Mountains flying over Georgia, Alabama, Mississipi, Louisiana and stopping at Texas, Arizona and Nevada. The great landmarks to visit include the Grand Canyon, The Death Valley, Hoover Dam and Las Vegas.

Planed stops along the route to Las Vegas (click HERE to follow to google maps).

The planed route will give us approximately 50 hours flying roundtrip time and more than 5000 nautical miles (nm) of ground distance, all that to be done in around 6 days. Regarding the stops depicted above, there might still be a few changes, mainly on the Grand Canyon Area, where we want to do a few touch and goes and landings on peculiar strips which have not yet been chosen.

After doing all the planing and since the weather was not in its best conditions we decided to set sail Monday, the 23rd of November. And now here we are, the first leg of our journey was about 480nm long and took us from Daytona to Laurel Field in the Mississipi in 4h55min. After a pit stop to refuel and stretch our legs we are now on our second leg of today’s trip which is taking us to Stephenville in Texas. Curently Francisco is the Captain, flying left hand seat on the Cessna, taking care of all the flying and navigation. It will take us about 4h and 30min to go along the 450nm that set both places apart and we are estimating Stephenville at 10pm, local time. By the time we arrive we shall have a car with keys on the ignition that we’ll use to go to the hotel to grab something to eat and have a good night´s sleep because tomorrow we will have another long day.

I’ll keep you all posted and photos shall follow in a near future and as the guys have been saying, this might whell be the journey of a lifetime.