Day 28 - Ithaca

Tony Cacciarelli • Jul 12, 2020

Ithaca, NY and Cayuga Lake

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Original Instagram Post

I woke up to decent looking skies, but the clouds rolled in quickly so by the time I got to the airport the ceiling was pretty low and the wind had picked up.

I did one lap around the pattern at KITH then went out over Cayuga Lake to check the conditions. The waves on the lake were over the one foot maximum allowed for the A5, so I didn't set down but I got to fly around the lake a bit and then headed back as the ceilings were dropping.

So, my streak is intact at 28 days of flying in a row.

As I was landing, a Bombardier Challenger came in ahead of me. Once I was shut down one of the pilots came over to check out the A5 and let me have a look inside the Challenger. Nice to have some mutual appreciation. 😁

I'm going to take an hour in the morning tomorrow and head back to the lake. Conditions should be better for a few water landings before I head off to Akron-Canton.

The MAPS Air Museum at Akron-Canton Regional Airport (KCAK) has planned a couple events around my visit for Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. I'm really excited to meet the folks there and check out the museum. If anyone's in the area, please stop by. Here's the landing page the museum put up for the event: https://mapsairmuseum.org/events/icon-a5-to-visit-maps/

I'm also working on a video of highlights from my day in the Adirondacks with fellow A5 owner Brett. Might even get that done tonight 🤞🏼

😀👍🏼

The plan for this day was to spend it exploring the Finger Lakes. I wanted to at least touch down on each of them. Given the weather I went through the day before to get here, I had a feeling that plan wasn't going to materialize. My feeling was right. I waited about an hour at the FBO for the weather to clear up. It did get better, but the forecast was showing another set of storms coming in, so I used that opening to get up in the air and continue my streak of 28 days of flying in a row.

I hadn't really thought about flying every single day as any kind of a 'streak'. It was just something that I was going to do as part of the trip. But, as I got further along it became something I wanted to keep going - although not at the expense of doing something unsafe, but more on that later.

Since I did get up and out for a short flight, I got to see some of Cayuga Lake and get a lay of the land. It made me wish I'd be able to explore the area more, but I had a commitment to do an event at the MAPS Air Museum in Akron/Canton, so I wasn't able to stick around an extra day, but since I didn't have to be in Akron early, I decided to spend some time the next morning on the lake. The weather forecast was looking much better (of course) so I was confident I'd be able to get a few water landings in.

The first additional pic here is part of the spreadsheet I used to initially plan each leg of the trip and also kept it updated as I went. Dates were calculated automatically based on a few critical stops (highlighted in purple]. This way I was able to plug in the number of days I planned to spend at each location and still hit my target dates. There was a LOT more information in there, but this was the key piece for keeping my timings straight. It would end up being even more critical in a couple weeks.

Second pic is the bar of soap in my hotel. I think the idea was to reduce waste, but the resulting shape was...interesting. Use cases are left to the reader's imagination.