Thank goodness your trip is over! Now I can go back to work without looking at your tracks and pictures every five minutes . Excellent job on you and your family

buzzbomb wrote:Thank goodness your trip is over! Now I can go back to work without looking at your tracks and pictures every five minutes . Excellent job on you and your family

That's awesome! Yes, we just got home. Final update to come later today once we've unpacked. Thanks for keeping an eye on us!


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Besides watching your delightful family enjoying the trip of a lifetime, one of the things that has struck me is how carefully you've handled the weather situations you've encountered--you've definitely followed the old saw about it being better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than being in the air wishing you were on the ground. Too often, especially as a trip's destination is almost in sight, it's tempting to push things. It's good for the less experienced pilots to see an experienced pilot take the conservative approach in the interests of safety.

Cary

Thanks Cary. It also helped that we were already 5 hours into another marathon day of flying and were getting tired. Had that storm not hit us, we would have done Kenai to Utah in 3 days, roughly 21 hours of flying. I know others have done it faster, but for us that was a fast pace and some long flying days.


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Day 23: We were up early after sleeping well in the hotel. After a good breakfast at the hotel, we loaded up and headed south. It was a pretty flight down past New Meadows, McCall, Cascade Lake, and on to Gooding for fuel. After fueling, we said our goodbyes to Allen and Stan in person, thanked each other for the amazing trip and launched for home. They were our safety blanket just like we were theirs and I wouldn't want to do the trip without them. We had good tailwinds with just a few bumps and smoky skies. An hour and change later we were home.

It's sad to think our adventure is over. I'm actually a bit bummed about not being in a tent tonight. Three weeks went by so fast. But, it was an amazing trip with incredible memories made.

So here are some stats:

- over 6,800 miles flown. Not bad for a 1952 and 1963 airplane!

- 65.6 hours flown.

- we flew 18 of the 23 days we were gone.

- we flew 51 flights (Allen had 52).

- we consumed roughly 600 gallons of fuel (I'm waiting for our last bill from Wilbur, WA)

- we averaged $4.79 per gallon fuel prices.

- we paid the highest price in Gulkana, AK ($5.63/gal).

- we paid the lowest price in Gooding, ID ($3.88/gal).

- of the $400 in cash we took, I used only about $110...and most of that was settling up shared costs with Allen. I spent no cash in Canada.

Ready to load up for our last leg home!


3 weeks of not seeing a razor. I gave up after a week!


The faithful 205 back in the barn. It's earned a (short) rest.


Thanks for joining us! I hope you've enjoyed coming along with us. I'll post a "lessons learned" and what went right and wrong summary soon. And a huge thanks again to all those great people we met along the way that really made this trip amazing!


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Welcome home Cory. Thanks for taking the time for the daily updates. It was fun to follow your great adventure.

Rich

PittsDriver wrote:Welcome home Cory. Thanks for taking the time for the daily updates. It was fun to follow your great adventure.

Rich

Thanks Rich.


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Cory, Alan and Family-

Like others, I have really enjoyed following your photos, progress and stories. While others talk and dream of adventures, you are doing it! With more than 8,000 views on this thread alone and many more to come, I am certain you have inspired many to expand their horizons and push the envelope of life a little farther than they did yesterday! This is something those children will remember and speak of forever! Thanks for sharing your family and adventure with all of us! Safe Travels- Dave

Epic Cory! You guys are parents of the year. Some how you should add the contents of this thread to a scrap book for your kids. It'll be years before they realize just how awesome that trip was and how unique and awesome you guys are as parents for pulling it off. No better use of a cool 205 I can think of.

Thanks Dave and Rob for the kind words. Dee is going to make a scrapbook for the kids and printing this thread out is a great idea. Since I've been using Tapatalk, I had no idea how many views it's gotten. Cool!

By the way, the kids did awesome and didn't complain, even on the long flying days. Sadie made the only complaint when, after her second helicopter ride she said, "I don't want to ride in the plane, I want to ride in the helicopter!" Geez! Spoiled kids!

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UtahMaule wrote:Epic Cory! You guys are parents of the year. Some how you should add the contents of this thread to a scrap book for your kids. It'll be years before they realize just how awesome that trip was and how unique and awesome you guys are as parents for pulling it off. No better use of a cool 205 I can think of.

ditto.

I enjoyed checking in to see what new adventures you guys were having each day! Sad that your trip is over...but thank you for taking the time to post up and let us enjoy it with you. Those will be life long memories for the kids for sure!

Thanks guys. I'm going through flying and adventures withdrawals today. Laundry and weed pulling just don't quite cut it!


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Our tracks. It's too big to get all the details in one shot.





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Cory,

I sure did enjoy following along. Thank you very much for taking the time to sit down and write out a daily trip report, how did you ever find the time? This is a trip Im sure you and everyone will remember forever. I only wish Alan's wife could have been along in person, Im sure she kept a watchful eye on all of you. What a great story for the kids on the "what I did on my summer vacation" when the return to school. Now get some rest!

Kurt

I had dinner last night with Marilyn's younger son, who is as adventuresome as I am. He's about 40, so he has many adventures ahead of him. Anyhow, in our discussion, we both remembered this quote (although neither of us had it quite right):

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

You've done that, and I'll bet you'll do it again, if not to AK, then somewhere else. What you're teaching your kids, though, is that there is more to life than sitting around playing video games, haunting the local mall, or wandering aimlessly through life saying "I'm bored." And, you've given them a heckuva story to tell, when this Fall their teachers say, "Tell us what you did this past summer."

Cary

Thanks for the kind words Cary and Kurt. I wish I could say the trip was completely video game and electronics free...but we aren't stupid! We did make them take a break every now and then to look out the window! I hope they will get the spirit of living life and having adventures!

Love the quote btw too!

We thought about Noreen a lot too. I know she was watching over us and would have loved it!

Yeah I don't think you'll be able to shut Adam up about "what he did this summer!" They have no idea how good they have it!

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I wasn't going to make one of the whole trip until I saw that the iPhone did most of it for me. Just needed tweaked a little. 8 minutes is a little long, but it was condensing 3+ weeks and 1200+ pics and vids!

I'll have some more flying videos soon.

https://youtu.be/SUBMvNNW7bM


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Cary wrote:“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

I did one of those laugh-then-cry things. This person was clearly not owning babies or toddlers. I will give you guys credit though; I've seen you pack all those kids around for years and been amazed. I'm trying to figure how it's got us so paralyzed.

Haha! I guess we started right from the get go with traveling abroad with Adam that we just don't know any better! And, we owe a lot of it to Rick Steves' advice on packing light and efficient for our Europe trips. We really felt like we had it dialed in for this trip for the most part. Oh, and never ending charging for electronic devices...an absolute necessity! And of course, Dee. I couldn't pull it off without her!


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