Brandi had a girls cruise launching out of Fort Lauderdale, so I flew her down to KFLL to meet up with her friends and go off galivanting around the Bahamas. I filed IFR and we broke through a slight overcast layer and had a beautiful flight down with decent tail winds. Brandi did some crafting on the flight, which was a fun way to pass the time and be productive. I dropped her off, got fuel, then headed back home. While waiting on departure I had two big passenger jets lined up waiting behind me. I grinned a bit at the thought of some random passengers looking out the window seeing tiny little me launching ahead of them and hoped they would have thought it was neat.
I stopped at Thomaston County airport on the way home to fill up on cheap fuel and sky divers were raining down around me as I fueled up, which made for a pleasant experience.
A week later I would return and this time crash a night with our friends Lenny and Anda at their airpark home just North of Fort Lauderdale. There was a storm front moving through the Atlanta area and frustratingly ATC wouldnt let me cross over the top of it at 13,000 feet despite me requesting VFR on top and very clearly seeing a line of sight over the storm. ATC gave me some nonsense about needing to go around the Bravo airspace, despite that it ended at 12500ft. I complied begrudgingly and suffered through 85+kt headwinds for 40 minutes going South West when I needed South East.
After clearing the weather I enjoyed a beautiful VFR on top sunset and arrived for a night landing around 8:30pm. Lenny said my landing lights were really bright and that made me super happy since Brandi and I upgraded them to the FlyLED lights. We enjoyed a great dinner and breakfast with them and Lenny and I stayed up till 1am talking about ChatGPT, books, aviation, and various other interesting yet nerdy things. :) Good times and much better than the alternative options of driving 20 hours or hassling with the airlines.
