Saturday, 03 August 7:58 p.m.

Two weeks ago I started planning a "fly" fishing trip. The plan was to grab a plane from the flying club and heading up to the Kernville airport. They have an on-site campground and are about ¼ mile from the Kern River. Everything was looking good... I had the plane reserved from 1500 on Saturday until 1700 on Sunday. (The club's policy is a minimum 2 hours per day when going cross country or over night. VERY reasonable as "club minimum's" go. The flight was to take about 2 hours anyway.) The weather was promising to be real good... Everything was looking good... Until last week when I noticed a Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) covering my destination. It extends all the way to 12,000' MSL. Seems there's a forest fire raging up there and they don't want folks getting in the way of the fire fighting planes... "No worries..." I thought... There's an airport east of here that I hear has a really neat aviation museum. I'll go there if the other place is still closed off... Then on Monday another fire started directly in my path to that airport. The initial TFR was rather small and would have been easy to avoid. By the time Thursday rolled around both the fire and the TFR had grown quite a bit. My plan was to use the Julian VOR as a turning point and a reference to work my way through all the Restricted areas and the MOA's I had to get past to get where I needed. Now I can't even get within 30 miles of the VOR. So Thursday afternoon I called the club and took my name off the list. The person on the other end told me I would make someone's day because they REALLY wanted that plane to do a PPL Check Ride on Saturday... At least someone will be enjoying it...

Not wanting to let this ruin my whole weekend I decided to go out for a bit of a ride on the motorcycle. I've noticed lately that the short bits of riding that I have been doing has left the battery a little flat so taking it out for a ride would do it some good. After filling the tank I headed out on 15 North. I spent the rest of the day using "Minute Hand Navigation". Which ever way the minute hand was pointing would determine which way I went. Pretty soon I found myself on I-8 going through Alpine and I had enough of the Super Slab. Time to find some back roads. I exited on Tavern Road and never regretted it. That road is mile after mile of high-speed sweepers. There were a lot of roads that I would have like to take along the way, but 75% of the area is closed down to public travel because of the fire.

Pretty soon I found myself on Palomar Mountain road headed up to the observatory. Getting to the top I saw they had the gate closed (closes at 1645) but the really strange thing was there was a buncha kids parked up there with their shiney go-fast cars. They were all just standing around looking at each other. Didn't look like a party was going on and it sure as hell wasn't a good place to be doing any drag racing. The nearest piece of straight road was 14 miles away. I didn't stick around to find out what was going on... There were more roads to be ridden. On the way back down the hill I came to another intersection and the minute hand told me it was time to take a right. That minute hand must have been on these roads before. That 20some miles down the mountain into Escondido was some of the finest riding I've seen in a long time. Smooth pavement, some real tight turns, some sweepers, a couple straight out sections, and very little traffic. Pretty soon I was in Escondido and turning onto I-15 to head back to San Diego.

I had the tent and sleeping bag with me just in case I found myself way out in the boondocks and too tired to return, but it wasn't to be today. With all the road closures being guarded by a Highway Patrol officer it was difficult to get lost...

I'm still looking forward to flying up to Kernville but I may have to wait a couple weeks...

On to next chapter

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