Updates- Day 1 of the Race!

Hi everyone!

We apologize for the delay in our updates- it has been crazy! We were able to see a lot of awesome people before our actual race start! On Saturday, Kristine, who raced last year, flew to Pasco with her husband, Robby. It was great seeing them! We showed them around the great sites of Pasco and of course took some pictures. Thank you for coming out and seeing us, Kristine! We miss you!

On Sunday, June 17th, we had our pre-race banquet in Pasco, Washington. We had a great group of supporters join us- a special thanks to Marlene, who also raced last year, Jerry Kidrick, and Frank and Debbie Ayers for coming out. We felt so great knowing that you would be cheering us on. We also had the privilege of meeting Elaine McCalley- the newest pilot to be presented the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award. Qualifications of this award require 50 years of flight experience! We were a little star struck.


Monday was race start! We woke up bright and early at 0530 only to open our windows and see a low cloud ceiling and lots of rain. We made our way over to the final briefing (just to make sure we knew how to turn on our trackers...) and headed to the airport. The airplane was wiped down from the morning rain, the preflight completed, all of our stuff was loaded and we were ready to say goodbye when we got news that we were on hold for 30mins. We proceeded to the FBO to wait to be released, when the ceilings just kept getting lower, and the rain kept coming. Our original departure time of 0800 was then pushed back to 1100, then to 1300, and finally at 1500... At this time, we found out that the race start had been moved from Pasco, WA to Mountain Home, ID where our first flyby would take place. In the blink of an eye, we saw a mad dash to the ramp. We waited just a bit to plan out our route, and know exactly where we had to go. We were able to remain VFR, stopped at a nearby airport to grab some fuel, and we were off! Our goal was to make it to Logan, Utah and spend the night there as Pasco was forecast to have even worse weather the next day. Because of the delay, we arrived at Logan just an hour or so prior to the official stop time of the day, but we were happy to make it and catch some sleep.