Winter flying is a mixed bag. Heck, in the last few weeks since I first posted about my new wandering adventures through the virtual airspaces I have officially traversed the rocky mountains and defeated all sorts of variable weather. The worst of it was landing blind in a snowstorm in the Kootenays, but even my most recent arrival at the Hope airport where I couldn’t see the runway for the snow on the ground there, it has been an all around couch-based adventure.
My second flight simulator trip is well underway.
Bardo has made a total of eight flights that have brought him down into southern Alberta before making an abrupt westward turn towards the coast. We have been skimming along the border at the 49th as we landed at a series of tiny Canadian airports just north of that demarkation.
A couple big changes to note, however.
The first change is that just south of Calgary we upgraded our plane. We had set out in a Cessna 172, the base model and an easy-to-fly prop plane. There was some nostalgia in that choice because it was the plane I took over to Japan in my first virtual adventure in 2020. And yet, it is a monotonously slow vehicle. You see a lot of scenery, sure, but you also average jumps of sixty or so nautical miles which takes an hour to fly (counting take offs and landings and all that fluff.) So, we traded up and splurged on a Diamond DA6 (apparently an old weather research plane) that has a top speed about fifty percent faster than the Cessna, but is also a light little prop plane that is casual enough for a classy adventure in the skies.
The second change is that I had AI write me a plugin for this blog. That’s right, I just asked Claude Code to make me a plugin to track all my flights. If I was gaming on a PC there are tools that integrate and make this easy, but on the PS5 I seem to be on my own for the moment. So, I now have a flight tracking tool here: https://wander.8r4d.com/flight-log/ and I may do some tweaks on it as we go, but for now it does the basics which is logging the flights and making a little map so that if you are interested you can see where Bardo and I have been flying.
Which is the next big question. I am approaching the coast, one stop away from Vancouver and on my last adventure that’s when I turned north and flew up to Alaska and beyond. This time I’m going south and leaning towards a coastal flight, but I think I want to do a bit of research first. Do I head straight down and follow the coastline itself, or do I jut inland and fly over some of those ‘mercan sights, y’know like via the grand canyon, Vegas, and those similar places. Or, do I head right on down towards Mexico and South America and explore an area of the map I’ve never been.
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