The older I get the more convinced I get that the most memorable/exciting things in life are those that happen last minute, or completely unplanned. 

My dad loves airplanes. We used to have pieces of one that he was going to build in the basement, and once upon a time he almost got his pilot license. Basically, he knows just as much if not more about them than the speaker business stuff. So when this "Fly Columbia tour" thing was coming to the Van Nuys airport, he was there. I went with him, so did my uncle and grandpa and my dad's pilot friend. It was fun, I enjoy getting to spend time with those people, and I like to see the older planes that are at the airport.

While my dad and his pilot friend could have spent all day looking at these very expensive planes, the rest of us not so much. So we headed over the 94th Aero Squadron restaurant, which is a really cool restaurant that one of the sides is all windows in which you can watch the planes take off from the Van Nuys airport, and it's just one of those nifty little restaurants that have so much cool stuff on the walls and whatnot that there's always something to look at and see. 

Dad's pilot friend had flown in to meet us that day, and offered if we wanted to go for a ride, and we're like yah! So it was decided why not a short trip over to Catalina? The plane he has is a Mooney (yah, so that yahoo search only came up with Harry Potter sites), and only holds four people. My uncle had  ridden in it before so he went home, and the rest of us piled in. My grandpa and I were squished into the back seats, and it must have taken us at least five minutes to figure out those seat belts. But I was really surprised, once we were settled, and I'm not exaggerating about the squished part, it didn't feel at all claustrophobic. I get claustrophobic fairly easily unfortunately, but not once on the flight did I feel it in the least. Probably a huge chunk of this has to do with how good a of pilot this guy is, when landing I couldn't tell we were landed without looking out the window because it was so smooth. 

Ok. Looking down and seeing LA/Van Nuys/All of it completely disappear into this brown layer of smog is officially one of the nastiest things I have ever seen. It was just this layer that totally enveloped the city, made you not want to go back down into it, and when you did hold your breath.

Something interesting I learned, there truly is no escaping the freeways. When these private planes are flying (in SoCal at least), they don't just get to fly where ever, once set in on a destination, they follow the freeways as a way of keeping an idea of where they are and preventing running into other planes.

A few other things I learned:

The Catalina Airport is commonly known as the "Airport in the Sky", and it is a completely fitting title. Basically the airport is this landing strip that is just stuck on the top of this hill in the middle of the ocean. 

The city of Avalon, I believe (don't quote me on it though) that this is the only city on Catalina. It is so geekily cool to hear on the radio "Approaching Avalon". Instead of saying "approaching Catalina airport", they say on the radio "Approaching Avalon". 

Copyright © Joelle Wright 2003-Present