On the last day, my goal was to not get sunburned, not get sweaty, pick up my wing and make it to the airport on time. I succeeded at 3/4 of these goals.

We woke up and made the last breakfast of the trip. The weather forecast was for absolutely no lift anywhere, so the people interested in flying resigned themselves to a day of sledies. (sled run, just going down, no up) We drove up the Rim of the World Highway (a very presumptuous name if you ask me) towards Crestline to see a man about a wing.

You may recall that the day before I had given my multiple thousand dollar wing to a man that I’d only just met, knew only by association from others and who was a professional paraglider/hang glider. It was said that he repaired wings in his house, and it seemed worth the risk. I walked into his house – pieces of old wings lay littered around, 4 sewing machines, a lot of other junk and my little guy was lying in the middle of the repair room. He showed me the job he’d done, and it seemed “ok” to me. Not that I know anything about anything. I gave him some money and he claimed that it was to much. I shrugged – he’d saved me from either sending my wing to Switzerland to Icaro, or driving to Mission several times to pay a guy a lot more money to fix it. I could afford to pay this dude more than he thought he was worth.

Interestingly (or maybe he’s just this friendly), I feel like my overpayment then bought us a guided tour of the Crestline launch just above and behind the Marshall launch that we’d been using for a few days already. 3 of the guys decided to launch from there, but the rest of us drove back down to Marshall. What I wanted from a flight – no fuss, no muss, no retrievals or out-landings. If I went from launch to landing in 7 minutes, then so be it. With a flight leaving from California that night there wasn’t a lot of room for error, so I took the route of no error.

Easy launch, easy flight and easy landing is what I got. Unfortunately while packing up my stuff for the last time on the trip, I worked up a sweat. >.< Damnit, now I was going to have to sit in that for a few hours on the plane.

I calculated that I more than doubled my total airtime with this trip. I previously had an estimated 7.95 hours. I gained an additional 8.75 of them!

We said our good byes and drove to LAX. I haven’t been in a lot of airports, but I can say with no doubt in my mind that LAX is the worst I’ve ever been in. With it’s massive loop, incomprehensible directions, important checkpoints strewn randomly about in hallways (baggage X-ray machines, line-ups for said machine, random check points, security check point) and the sorriest excuse for a selection of international departure restaurants that I’ve seen, I can’t recommend spending much time there.

As we took off, the fog was really low. We flew into it and then above it. The clouds stretched out forever across the horizon, looking like a beautiful frozen wasteland below us. As we turned, a mountain range came into view and the clouds looked like they were spilling out over it like a waterfall. Add in an amazing orange, red and yellow sunset across the sky, and you have a recipe for a gorgeous view.

I took Monday off work to hang out with Miranda and decompress. Tomorrow I’m back at work. Before I left I was sad to leave my project for a week and a bit. Now I’m sad to go back!