Well, I guess it's up to me to do the honors today. Wednesday April 2, the self-employed and no-longer-employed (Judy McC, Steve K and I) took advantage of the beautiful weather and made a trip to Yasgar's Farm...ooops, wrong Woodstock. Conditions were quite mild when we arrived (despite the 15-25 mph NWS forecast) so the two of them decided to sacrifice the only H2 (me!) to the wind gods. Managed to get above launch somewhat and tooled around for about 10 minutes before I lost the lift. I brought it in for a decent approach (yes, I should have had more reserve altitude on the approach) and a nice one step landing.

As Steve retrieved me, Judy was off next with a nice flight (detailed left for her to fill in). By the time we got back things were starting to pick up. Steve launched and was immediately a bazillion over, or at least it seemed that way. He headed out to look at the big rigs on I-81 and eventually found his way back to the LZ. (detailed left to Steve).

By now, things started getting too breezy for me (15 with gusts to 20 mpg) so we hung out for a while. About 5 pm, the magic was turned on and the winds decreased a bit. I launched and somebody pressed the "UP" button. Yowieeee! Not having an altimeter I can only say that I was so far above launch that the sky started to turn violet, the stars came out and I could see the curvature of the earth. I think I even saw Hale-Bopp. Well, maybe not that high. After about 30 minutes, with the sun setting, a face full of snot and bad case of knee-hanger back disease, I decided to call it a flight. Then I was faced a dilemma I never experienced before: How do you get these things down? I eventially managed to figure it out and returned for a somewhat less graceful landing than before. I think I could have stayed up all night. You know, it's amazing that you can still smell cow manure at 2000 ft agl. That's some potent stuff.

Judy got another, what appeared to be pleasant evening-magic flight after me. We loaded-up the gliders as darkness decended over the LZ and drove off to the gentle moooing of cows in the darkness.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The end.

Dave Z