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Vacation Time
Posted by Fred on Friday, July 25th, 2008
Relaxing in the Sun
Venice, FL
Venice is a small island in southwestern Florida, south of Sarasota. Known for gated communities of condos, the island has its own airport, complete with a variety of flying schools. Venice is primarily populated by more elderly folks, and experiences a dramatic population decrease in the summer.
Sam, Dan and I are spending ten days down in sunny Venice, Florida. Venice doesn't have a whole lot to offer the younger generations, but we've just been taking it easy on the beach and by the pool. Our housing is free thanks to Dan's uncle, and relaxing in the beautiful weather (encouraged by hurricane Dolly, which missed Florida but generated high pressure systems to keep the thunderstorms away). Although there is a distinct lack of younger people here, the weather has been beautiful and we have just been soaking in the sun. Tomorrow we are going up to Siesta Key to check out the beach there and maybe find a little fun.
You Ate How Much!?
One of the first things we noticed on this trip is that food is expensive! I have a new appreciation for why my parents always seem to spend so much at the supermarket. It also doesn't help that we seem to be powering through everything that we buy. Even though there's only three of us, we are amazed at the colossal amount of money we've spent on even just simple, inexpensive foods like pasta. We made stir fry twice so far - a little accomplishment we're pretty proud of. However, I think that's as fancy as our cooking will get. Sam has taken up a neat little project in an attempt to calculate the total weight of all the food we eat over the course of the trip. Right now we're at around 86 lbs, including the estimated weight of the liquids we've consumed (4 gallons of Gatorade, 2 bottles of orange juice, and more...), which might be incorrectly calculated. I don't know why being on vacation has motivated us to eat so much, but we're currently on a 4-6 meal/day schedule, plus snacks. It's like my stomach has no idea when it's full any more!
Given to Fly
Touch-and-Go
A procedure where an airplane lands on the runway, reconfigures the plane for take-off, and then proceeds to take off again without stopping the plane.
Today I took my first flying lesson. It was so much fun! I got to fuel the plane after the pre-flight inspection (under the careful watch of Leonard, my fantastic instructor), taxi for a brief period to the runway, and actually got to take off the plane! We took the Cessna 152 out to some practice space outside of the Venice airfield where I got a feel for the controls, and we did a little bit of "cloud chasing", or flying around and in-between clouds (VFR flights are not permitted to enter clouds due to limited visibility). After that Leonard explained and demonstrated to me how to fly a traffic pattern and we did some touch-and-gos, my instructor giving me control of the plane more and more each time we went around. I did not get to actually land the plane, as there is a lot of difficult rudder work involved - however, I flew the pattern pretty well and had some decent approaches. After I told Leonard I had some experience playing the Flight Simulator series of games he said it had obviously paid off. Apparently I handled the plane pretty well for a first-timer, and had a natural feel. While I would agree that Flight Sims can't reproduce the real thing, I think they are also valuable training tools. Getting to be in an actual plane as it buffeted around in cloud-induced turbulence and feel the plane rock to the side as I lowered a wing to turn was absolutely terrifying, brilliantly exciting, and makes a computer game pale in comparison!
Still lots of time left here in Venice. I'll be sure to report back on our food weight tally and I might just have to write more about my flying experience :)
(P.S.: I've already managed to get sunburned!)
Mood: 
Total Comments (2)
Tagged under flying, flight simulator, vacation in venice
Comments
Still jealous
Posted by Trenton on 07/26/08 at 5:14 am
Pass some of that sun up here, will ya? What I would give for consistent weather.. The flying sounds incredible man, definately an awesome-sounding experience!
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