Day 10 - Orlando to Tampa

Tony Cacciarelli • June 24, 2020

Orlando, FL (KORL) to
Tampa, FL (KTPF) - June 24, 2019

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Nice Florida late morning weather

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Hi Livi!

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Lots of A5s

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Yeah, it's a chain...but I like it

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Original Instagram Post

This is the first part of the trip where the pace really changed. With all the great places to fly (and land) in Florida, I’ve set aside several days to check out Miami, Key West and a bunch of lakes in the area.

It was a quick flight from Orlando to Tampa this morning. I met up with the ICON folks at Peter O Knight airport (KTPF) and had some general maintenance done on the A5.

While that's happening, I went back to the Rusty Pelican, a restaurant I visited when I was in Tampa several years ago. It’s a nice, old-school style place with a good menu and great service. I had my first of what will probably be many conch fritters and key lime pie as I head down into the Keys.

Tomorrow I'll fly to Miami. I may make a slight detour to land on Lake Okeechobee.

😀👍🏼

Since the flight over to Tampa was fairly short, I recorded some narration while I flew along. The GoPros were cooperating (mostly) so I figured it was a good chance for a recap. I talked about some of the technical parts of the flight, a bit about my journey so far and just whatever came to mind and cut it into a short video and posted on YouTube. I didn't think much of it, honestly.

A day or so later, ICON Aircraft linked to that video in one of their social media posts and the next thing I knew the view counter was going through the roof. As of right now, one year later, it has over 500,000 views.

This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, since I was trying to generate interest in general aviation, I wanted to get as much visibility for my trip as I could. But, it also means you get the worst part of social media; know-it-all commenters. I know, I know...don't read the comments. But, I found it discouraging the amount of effort certain people put into finding some small thing to be negative about. This was mostly a YouTube thing. My daily Instagram posts were almost 100% positive.

I was already backing off on the amount of images and video I was capturing each day. I came to the realization early on in the trip that if I tried to really document everything the way I wanted, I would be spending all my time trying to get just the right picture or video shot. The danger with that is you're so involved with the mechanics of documenting everything that you actually miss out on being present in the moment. This is a big deal for me and I decided this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and while I wanted to capture as much of it for posterity as I could, I also wanted to have the memories in my head, not just as video and pictures.

So, based on all that I decided I wouldn't post another YouTube video unless I had something really interesting to show - and I ultimately ended up turning off comments on that one video. I still did some narration while flying and I have that footage if I decide to do something more with it, but I didn't want to spend precious time while I was on the road creating stuff that would just feed the trolls.