Smokestacks

Something warm slithered down my back as my fillings seemed to shake loose from my mouth. The nuclear power plant below was breathing fire at us, reminding that the only thing between our butts and the ground 6000 feet below was a thin sheet of Kansas-crafted aluminum.

I was still feeling rather rather poorly after a day-long bout with some bug that completely knocked me back to bed. In addition to regular prayer sessions at the porcelain temple, I seemed to have pulled a muscle in my neck from laying funny in bed. I got a self-stick heat pad to applied it to my neck so I could at least drive again without looking so much like a retarded zombie. Ahhhh! Remind me to nominate the inventors of the heat pad for the Nobel Prize; I really don't think I would have gotten out of bed without it. He-who-is-much-smarter-than your-average-bear called when Maike was done her swim meet to see if I wanted to go out to Amish country to look at a GPS. I had my pilot bag in the car, the heat pad on my neck and two barf bags in the glovebox, so of course I agreed. Went to the Shoprite to buy a sandwich, and called my Dad to wish him a happy birthday while I sat on a bench at the runway waiting for my ride. Here he comes in for a landing at Princeton:

A moment later we extended our upwind leg to fly over Maike's house, made a tight 180 and set course for Lancaster, PA. Now, one of the coolest landmarks in the Northeast is a set of cooling towers over in Pottstown, PA. You can see them, on a clear day, from as far south as Maryland. My first solo cross-country flight was out here; my instructor suggested it would be a good destination because if you can't see it from central New Jersey, you probably don't deserve to be flying. As luck would have it, the towers were right along our route. I am really into navigating the old-fashioned way, ever since sailing without a GPS in shoal-filled waters of the Chesapeake, so I settled into the right seat and busied myself with looking up the radio frequencies to talk to ATC for VFR flight following and setting the VOR radios to practice cutting-edge 1940's pilotage and radio navigation. The fourth waypoint were the towers at Pottstown, which we were able to see shortly after take-off from Princeton. I was soooo proud that the whole navigation plan was going so well; we had nailed every waypoint to within mere feet it seemed, including the cooling towers of the power plant. I was busy getting a fix on the next waypoint when we saw steam at 10 o'clock at our altitude. Strange, there wasn't a cloud in the sky a moment earlier. And at 5500 feet altitude that couldn't be possibly be coming from the ground? The airplane shook as if we had been hit by a deer. We made a quick turn to the left, and bounced up and down like a frog in a blender. My heat pack's adhesive failed and the warm, now sweaty pad slid down my back to lodge in the small of my back as I tried to figure out if we were getting out of the way of the steam. A quick look down, and I expected to see the nuclear fires beckoning to us from the power plant below. We were clear of the updraft seconds later, but the moment seemed to last much, much longer. We had gotten so close to our nav-fix that we had actually flown over the thermal column exapnding upwards from the 3000 foot column of steam.

"That's going to end up in your damned blog, isn't it?"

"I guarantee it!"

So here it is.

The rest of the flight was uneventful. I would like to publicly acknowledge the good humor of the control tower at Lancaster, for being so accomodating in switching our landing clearance from 31 right to 31 left after someone (that would be me) had some last minute distance estimating issues. We'll leave it at that.