Thursday, May 30th 6:39 p.m.

Happy-Happy, Joy-Joy...

Today started out pretty plain and boring. This "wonderful" Southern California weather was doing nothing to improve my mood. I think I've seen the sun one time for about 2 minutes since I got to San Diego. After sitting through another interminable day of blah-blah-blah I was about to go out of my gourd. Finally it was time to leave so I went back to the barracks.

After a while I thought I'd better go out and get a bit to eat at the Galley. On the way over there I saw a sign for MWR and decided to stop in to see what kind information they had on camping in the area. I want to get away from this place for the weekend. They didn't have much but told me who did. On the way out I grabbed a "What's Happening" magazine and flipping through it I saw an advert for the Navy Flying Club at North Field!!!! Until that moment I had no idea there was such a thing there. All my internet searching for flying clubs in the area revealed nothing about a Navy Flying Club!! So I swung by the galley and choked sown some-kind tuna noodle stuff (the salad bar was good, though) and headed off across the Big Blue Bridge over to Coronado. Came across another quirk about riding motorcycles in California I had forgotten about... No bridge tolls...

As I was snooping around North Island looking for the club house I came around a corner and saw a ship's superstructure sticking up above a building... It had the number "74" painted on it... Well wadda know?? The USS Stennis! That's MY boat. I am a plank owner of the Stennis. Had to do a slow crawl through the parking lot to take a good look at my old home. Not looking too bad, but it had a lot of black smoke damage on the starboard aft quarter. Probably from a badly tuned tug boat, but I never saw that on her before....

I finally located the flying club and talked to the Club Manager for a while. They've got quite a few planes there ranging from C152's to a Seneca II PA-34... The prices are about HALF of what I was paying in Guam and quite a bit less than the going rate in Hawaii...I can get a Piper Cherokee for $49 an hour. They've also got a few of what they call a T41. It's nothing more than a 160 HP C-172 with the back seats removed. Gotta go sign up and take a couple written tests (open book) and get checked out by a CFI then I'm on my own!!!!!! It's a $50 initiation fee, $19 a month dues (unless you fly 6 hours a month then the dues are waved) and they're "overnight" charge is a minimum of two hours a day. Mighty fine rates, if I do say so myself.Looks Like I'll be doing a bit of flying if this weather ever clears out... Gonna have to bone up on my Class B airspace operating procedures!!!