14 hours on the road.  Not including biological breaks and fuel stops.  But all eminently worth it!

My wingman FOD and I left Airspeed Intergalactic Spaceport this morning at 0545 US ET and pointed the nose of the trusty crew vehicle west.

The first stop was the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois.  It’s a  Mies van der Rohe design.  It’s a paradigmatic example of modernist design.  It’s beautiful.  And anyone who thinks that it blends in with nature or disappears into its setting is fooling himself.  The house stands out starkly with its bright white color, cantilevered feel, and right angles.  It’s exactly what it’s supposed to be:  A functional artifice in a beautiful natural setting.

We drove through Norway, Illinois on the way south and west to Topeka.  This little display captures much of what’s eclectic, friendly, beligerent, and slightly imbalanced about the backroads that we drove on the way here.  It’s most of a Beech 18/C45.  The sign reads (with no proofreading other than conversion to sentence case): “Dedicated to . . . all farmers and ag-related business folks that have lived thru the ‘agricultural crash of the 1980′s.”  And there’s a sign on the telephone pole, like others that we saw around town, that advertises fundamentalist bible videos available on YouTube.  Rain on the scarecrow.  And other stuff.

We showed up at forbes Field just in time to get the Airspeed crew vehicle out onto the ramp and then to unload and thrash about with banjo, mandolin, guitar, and other implements of destruction before  moving tables and chairs into the main hangar and heading to the hotel to write this and try to get some sleep.

Check in tomorrow when the content begins to fly in earnest!

Yeah, being the narrator is cool.  You get the ears of everyone at the show for 15 minutes each day.  And, if you really rock that mic, you occasionally get asked to pick up another performer and narrate for him or her, too.

It’s also cool to get up and fly the demo liaison and media flights, whether solo or in a formation.  Watching the guy in the next aircraft over work out the camera angles and try to get the right light.  Or watching the face of the guy in your own aircraft when you hand over the controls on a single-ship ride and and let him or her fly over his home town.

The team looks really good up there.  It’s not hard to be impatient about getting to the FAST card checkride.  But then something happens that makes it kind of worthwhile.  You walk across the ramp and see a guy enthusiastically taking pictures of the cockpit of one of your team’s birds.  All of that stuff on the panel is cool as hell and he’s taking shot after shot of it.

And, yeah, that’s the bird that you flew here and the bird that you’re going to fly back.