CoffeeBear.net

Fly-In/Drive-In Breakfast at Marion Airport

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

Every year for the 4th of July, Cedar Rapids puts on this huge fes­ti­val to cel­e­brate. It starts up in mid-June and goes through the 4th. For the past sev­eral years, Ariesna and I have bought but­tons for the fes­ti­val¹ but have missed most of the fes­ti­val. Given that we live in Cedar Rapids now, we’ve been mak­ing an effort to actu­ally attend some of the events. This morn­ing we got up at 7 AM², hopped into the car and drove out to the Mar­ion Air­port. The air­port was host­ing a Fly-In/Drive-In break­fast, offer­ing airplane/helicopter rides and had numer­ous planes for spec­ta­tors to look at. Ariesna & I decided to go for a heli­copter ride which was … quite the expe­ri­ence. First off, here’s a few rules/tips for any other first-time fly­ers to keep in mind when going to one of these sort of things:

• Wear blue jeans or at least some kind of pants. Stand­ing near the land­ing area for the heli­copter gets rather chilly with the chop from the spin­ning blades.
• Tuck your shirt in so it doesn’t blow up around you.
• Wear shoes, not san­dals. Makes it eas­ier walk­ing through the grass over to where the heli­copter was landing/taking off.
• Leave your hat in the car. The chop from the heli­copter is strong enough to blow it off your head.
• Leave your purse/bag in the car. There’s very lim­ited space in a heli­copter, and you don’t want it to:
  • bonk the con­trols with a heavy bag while the pilot is try­ing to do his thing.
  • watch your purse/bag go slid­ing out the heli­copter to fall way, way, way down to the ground.

Just a few thoughts you should con­sider. Any­way, back to the story. Ariesna was feel­ing very ner­vous about the flight while we were wait­ing in line but doing her best to stay calm. Then when we were 3rd in line, the peo­ple in front of us asked to switch places with us as there were only 2 heli­copters in ser­vice for the rides and they wanted to chat with the pilot of the one we would have rid­den on. We imme­di­ately took them up on their offer and then had a pleas­ant chat with them while they waited. It turned out they’ve been com­ing to this Fly-In/Drive-In for the past 3 years and look for­ward to fly­ing with one par­tic­u­lar pilot every year. They also reas­sured Ariesna about the flight and got her calmed down nicely. Then before we knew it, it was our turn. The heli­copter had room for 3 pilot (1 pilot & 2 pas­sen­gers). Ariesna climbed into the cen­ter of the air­craft while I got the “win­dow seat”. I put that in quotes because the side of the heli­copter was totally open. No win­dows, no doors just a big, big hole you climbed in/out of³. Once we were strapped in and put on our head­phones, I real­ized I had some­thing of a prob­lem. Either the cord on my head­phones was very short, caught on some­thing or I was sit­ting on it but I had no lee­way with it. I couldn’t sit up or even really hunch over while wear­ing the head­phones. I ended up, slightly hunched with the head­phones partly askew. The lift-off made me think of a bumpy roller coaster and then we were in the air over a corn field. It was also around that time I real­ized I was def­i­nitely going to have prob­lems with this ride. See, I tend to get ver­tigo but only in a cer­tain range of heights. Under roughly 10–12 feet and fly­ing in an air­plane up above the clouds, I’m fine. How­ever for cer­tain dis­tances between there, heights can give me the willies. I tend to think of it as the range between small hurts and cer­tain death. The heli­copter flew at just the per­fect height to trig­ger my feel­ings of ver­tigo. Wheeee! Now add in the lack of a door on the heli­copter, being strapped in with a sin­gle lap belt and my side of the air­craft being the one which dropped down on every turn; and you’ll under­stand why I only took 2 pho­tos dur­ing our flight. Spend­ing the rest of it with one hand clamped to the side of the heli­copter and the other locked onto my wife’s hand. Nat­u­rally, she thought this was hilarous once we landed.

*sigh* No respect, no respect at all.

Then we walked around look­ing at the planes setup for show, snap­ping a cou­ple of pics⁴. When I later review the pics, it turned out most were over-exposed, so I’ll have to edit them in GIMP before post­ing the rest. Finally, we decided to get some break­fast. Only the line at the airport’s break­fast was long and the food looked unap­peal­ing. So we drove off to Vil­lage Inn, had an entirely too big of a break­fast com­plete with cof­fee and pie. Mmmm, pie. Good times, good times.

¹ The but­tons get you into some events for free or at a reduced rate.
² *ugh* On the week­end, we strongly pre­fer to lounge about till late in the morn­ing.
³ There were obvi­ous mount­ing points for a door, so I’m guess­ing they removed the door to make it eas­ier to get peo­ple in/out for these rides.
⁴ Which I have posted to a Fly-In/Drive-In set on my Flickr account.

Similar Posts

• Review: Deception Point
  Deception Point My rating: 2 out of 5. This started off as a fun book and for a long time into it I ...
• Thanks iLounge & Mobile Line!
  Sometime back (long enough ago that I'd completely forgot about it), I was visiting iLounge looking ...
• Back from “some rest”
  After we finally left town for our honey-night1, Ariesna nodded off and went to sleep for most of th ...
• Fah
  Over the weekend, Ariesna and I went to the Robert Burn's dinner put on by HAGGIS. It was fun, thoug ...
• Funny, Damn Funny!
  A friend at work sent me a link to this video, How Not To Get Your Ass Kicked By The Police by Chris ...