Back from down east (in the USA)

At the end of June 2017 we flew PTN to Yarmouth in Nova Scotia, as I recorded with great pleasure in this blog. This summer, again just before Canada Day, we took the plane across the border to the coastland of northeastern Maine, to spend a few days in the Bar Harbor area. As before, we flew through some beautiful but unsettled skies on both the outbound and return journeys. This post describes the home-bound legs.

Our route went clockwise, with changes of heading at the dots

Wednesday morning was a cool, foggy, wet one at Bar Harbor airport (KBHB). We waited till almost midday until the cloud began to lift (it was still raining, dripping in around the air vents) and took off on an IFR flight plan to enter the cloud at 300 ft above ground, on a heading of 040, not emerging above that layer until we'd reached 6000 ft, by which time we were well on our way to the beacon at Augusta. Never saw what Augusta looked like, down there. It is the state capital, not large. Before long, the unbroken whiteness did break up, as promised in the forecast, into cloudlets with blue sky above, and ahead of us was higher, summer cumulus. Our heading changed to a direct line from Augusta to KLEB, our destination, taking us at an altitude of 8000 ft through two or three MOAs (Military Operations Areas) which were inactive, fortunately, like the ones we'd flown through from Sherbrooke to Bangor, on Sunday. This route took us south of Mount Washington, the position of which we could deduce from the pile-up of cumulus above and around it. The mountain ridges beneath our wheels were steep and the summits rocky and bare, with cloud shadows in the forests.

Undercast breaking up

Cumulus building on the horizon, over Mt. Washington

Connecticut R. at White River Junction, from the Vermont side

Landing at Lebanon, KLEB, was easy, after a 15 mile visual, straight-in, final approach. I had informed the Granite Air Center FBO that we'd be arriving at that time (1:45 p.m.) and the girl at the desk had ordered a taxi to pick us up and take us to our hotel. The taxi was waiting as we rolled in; a ramp attendant helped us park and the taxi driver came straight up to our plane to load our very small amount of luggage into her car, thence driving us straight out onto the road. This saved us a good deal of time. She was an interesting person to talk to—taxi drivers nearly always are—she'd been born on a native reservation near Chicago, but liked her home on a hill by the Connecticut River, with human remains in her garden, so she claimed. This too was former tribes' land, with a native graveyard on her property. At Hallowe'en she makes the most of this, scaring the local children with "eyes" lighting up above the graves.

Main Stree, White River Junction

White River Junction, the locality of the hotel I'd chosen, turned out to be worth a visit. It's actually one of several little towns or villages that amalgamated into a town called Hartford, but on the Google map it's labelled West Lebanon. The other part of "Lebanon" is across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire. White River flows into the Connecticut here, and is brown, not white. The "Junction" refers to the two railway lines that have met here since the 1840s. Amtrak trains still carry passengers to New York and then Washington, DC, but that slow journey on The Vermonter takes over 11 hours, if you board at this station early in the morning. It would feel like a pretty long day. A gentleman talked to us at the station's Welcome Center, and told us about the trains and the town, how it has revived considerably since the 1970s, when the unemployment rate was around 40%. Nowadays, unemployment is at a very low percentage because the area has embraced modern technology (solar power, for example) and the arts (with several theatres, a college for cartoonists, galleries); medical and science institutions have been established in this region too. It seemed lively for a small place, buzzing with optimism. The town hall put on free concerts; the outdoor one we overheard went on for two hours! Next door to our hotel, a Turkish-American entrepreneur had established a restaurant, the Tuckerbox, where we ate well, served by a waitress from Kazakhstan, and a gift shop called Little Istanbul.

Hotel Coolidge entrance, with a thunderstorm coming

The Hotel Coolidge, was one of the oldest buildings in White River Junction. It has two square towers and a very long wing where the bedrooms are. We were given a sort of suite on the upper level: two bedrooms, one with a single bed, and a bathroom in the middle. Ideal for a three person family! The furniture, window fittings, hallways were old. The shower and its plumbing was ancient and erratic. We liked the place though; it had character. The hotel's owner-receptionist had a sealed-off area in the high-ceilinged lobby to herself. This morning she gave us a voucher form for our small breakfast at the adjoining coffee shop where the lady who served us was very insistent that it be properly filled in. I could have spent hours in that coffee shop, which had a sort of library in the corner and several issues of the New Yorker to read, but Chris wanted to get going with his flight preparations at the airport. The Granite Air Center was a comfortable spot too, mind, having Adirondack chairs by the big windows where you can sit and watch the action on the airfield, comfortable leather armchairs behind them in the rest of the room. There were historic news clippings and old photos on the walls and 1950s Coca Cola aviation themed adverts in a display cabinet. The FBO building has a completely solar panelled roof, installed a year ago, the output from which offsets a huge amount of carbon emissions, apparently a very successful idea. The receptionist gave me two miniature bottles of maple syrup as a souvenir when I paid for our Avgas.

Crossing the Canadian border (St. Lawrence River) into Ontario

So this morning we left Lebanon for Ottawa at 11 a.m. on a flight lasting 2 hours 15 minutes, via the RUCKY waypoint and the Burlington (BTV) VOR, before which we overflew Mount Ellen (4083 ft) and other peaks of the White Mountains. Cloud formation and development along our route seemed to be associated with the hills and lakes, in particular at the western edge of Lake Champlain where they grew larger and bumpier, gloriously white and bulbous from a distance, but with dark grey undersides and centres when you are in amongst them. Pilots of the large commercial planes were reporting "light chop at all levels" according to one of the controllers. We had filed to "climb and maintain 8000" but when I started complaining about the turbulence in the bubbly areas, Chris requested a descent to 6000' where we could just about stay below the flatter cloud bases. No thunderstorms in our vicinity earlier today, although as I write this in the evening, with rain falling, I can hear the rumbles of local storms. At lunchtime, there was obviously some "weather" over the Mt. Tremblant area in the distance beyond our right wing.

Clouds to the west of L. Champlain

Over the Massina VOR near the border, as we were handed over to Montreal Centre by the Boston Centre air traffic controllers, we changed our heading again, direct to Rockcliffe. The lower clearer air was also turbulent on that leg, for some reason, but we were congratulating ourselves on a most successful and enjoyable trip as we homed in to Rockcliffe. We made a dramatic arrival though. At the last moment, after touching down, we had a sudden flat tyre (or tire) and went bumpety-bump till PTN stopped in the middle of the active runway, necessitating an immediate closure of that runway (other pilots having to continue their overhead circuits for 10 more minutes) and Rockcliffe staff hastening across the field to make sure we weren't in too much trouble. We weren't. Chris had kept the plane well under control and had brought it to a stop at the edge of the grass. The inner tube had simply worn out. It was replaced by Pat and his team in the hangar straight away. Chris was shown the hole.

Flat tyre on landing!