Tasty Food and Lots of Flying

Things have quieted down lately with the holidays over and our traveling done for the time being. Not that that's a bad thing! Sometimes it's nice to lay low for a little while and regroup for the next adventure. :)

Restaurant Week was a few weeks ago, and since Mark and I are always up for trying tasty new food we decided to head into DC for dinner. We made good time and got there a little early, so we walked down to the Sculpture Garden. They have an ice skating rink set up there! I wish we had more time because I've been wanting to go ice skating for a while now, but the line to buy tickets was ridiculously long and it was chilly.

We had dinner at Oyamel, a fantastic Mexican restaurant. I couldn't believe how much food they gave us! I had ceviche, meatballs in a chipotle sauce (pictured here), some shrimp, a shredded chicken taco, and a little rum cake for dessert. Their salsa was excellent...seems the secret is smoky chipotle chiles. I was really impressed with the mojito, too...they use mint-infused rum and top it with a lime foam ('air', according to the drink menu) that doesn't un-foam. When you take a sip the cool mint mixes with the sharp lime and it's just delicious. I think I just drooled on my laptop a little. (Also, the glass bottle of water they left on the table brought back fond NZ memories...all of the cafes over there do that.)

Thanks to the unusually warm and snowless winter, I've been flying much more than I expected to the past few weeks! I've only lost a few flights to weather so far. One of my students got permission to land at a private field near Middleburg, so we flew by to check it out. The runway (not pictured here, oops) is a nice open grass strip; I thought the town looked really cool from above.

A few hills near my student's farm. His son is digging a pond and he likes to fly over it to see how much progress he's making. :)

Last week we were doing some VOR tracking and decided to track a radial off Linden VOR (LDN) westbound...straight into West Virginia. I liked how the ridges were such straight lines.

The next morning I got up early, but for good reason! Our Skycatcher was at Manassas (HEF) for some maintenance and needed to be ferried back to Warrenton (HWY). As a reward for getting up so early on my day off, I got to fly it back! It was great to get some more stick time, and was certainly one of the most painless flights I've ever had out of HEF and the SFRA. I'm still getting used to both the flight controls (a yoke/stick combo type thing) and the G300 display, so I really appreciated the solo time. The Skycatcher has NO analog instruments...everything is contained on the screen. The airspeed and altimeter are tapes along the sides of the display, all of the engine instruments are at the top, and the GPS is integrated on one of the other pages. I'm sure at some point the buttons and commands will all become second nature...I'm just not quite there yet!