TAO-Victoria Regional Airport

Scott's flight school moved to New Braunfels about two weeks ago, which is about 40 minutes away, whereas San Antonio International was about 5 minutes away. For now he's making the drive, but we're looking into renting from Boerne instead, which is about 30 minutes away and also has lower rates and different planes.

The New Braunfels Municipal Airport.

En route to Victoria. It was very peaceful, just cruising along in the dark at 5500 feet. Very nice date night!
The moon.

Victoria.

Victoria is a very friendly airport, we had a great experience. Even though we got in pretty late (about 8:30), a very helpful young chap named John marshaled us in, gave us keys to a courtesy car (which was free, a rarity these days), and directions to the Sky Restaurant just down the road. He was super helpful and very friendly.

The General Aviation hangar, very cool old-style hangar.

The Sky Restaurant. Fantastic food, but too much of it!

TAO-Mustang Beach Airport

Scott flew with Brad Friday night to the airport at Mustang Beach and got some awesome pictures of the sunset.

Texas Aerodrome Odyssey-Clark Field Municipal Airport

Scott is now flying weekly to build hours, and to make it fun we decided to set a goal of visiting every public use airport in Texas. We're dubbing it the "Texas Aerodrome Odyssey." We'll visit airfields large and small, meet some interesting people, check out the local eateries, and blog about what we see. Texas is a big state, and there are roughly four hundred public use airports (we're going to formulate a list with an exact number but haven't gotten to it yet). We're long on ambition, short on time, and already suffering weather and aircraft maintenance delays. We wanted to officially start January 1st and had planned a flight to Houston the first Saturday of January as our first adventure, but had to cancel due to weather. We were on vacation the next weekend and this past weekend Scott only had time to go by himself on a quick flight to Llano and back. Ideally, we would go on a "TAO" flight every weekend. That being said, Scott still needs to build hours regardless if we have time to make an adventure of every flight, so last night was actually the first official TAO flight and it involved Scott and his friend Brad flying to Stephenville, TX (just south of Dallas) in the dark to get some BBQ at Hard Eight Pit BBQ. They met no one and saw very little, but had some great BBQ and got quite a long flight in!

Beautiful sunset!

Hard Eight BBQ.

There was a ring around the moon, which Brad later learned from his mom were ice crystals in the stratosphere. ;-) Although Renee couldn't make this one, we're rolling now...watch out Texas, here we come! (Even if it takes 10 years!)

Back in the Bayou

This past weekend we went on a quick mini-vacation to New Orleans and visited our friends Jim and Wendy and their daughter Sophia, whom we hadn't seen since we moved except for dinner with Jim about a year ago when we all happened to be in Dallas. First though, earlier in the week Scott went to New Jersey and got a chance to get some time in the Gulfstream 450/550 simulator. He didn't crash and learned a lot, so the trip was a success!

Jim and Wendy have four small dogs and six exotic birds (which they let out at night to eat). Bridget wasn't even a very noticeable addition :-) Scott and Julius.

Audrey eating some bread.

Wendy feeding Sammy and Gabrielle grits.

They've also moved from Stennis, MS back to Lakefront Airport in New Orleans (where they were based before Katrina), so Mrs. Taylor's jet has a hangar now.

This is a Howard 500 that Mr. Taylor had been having restored. It's been sitting here since the hurricane.

This is an upside-down King Air that has been sitting since the hurricane.

We also went to the shooting range where Jim taught Renee the basics.
Sophia was in her first Irish dancing competition where she won five medals! Renee had never heard of Irish dancing, but it's basically Riverdance where you hold your arms straight at your sides and dance with your feet. Very cool!We stayed away from the French Quarter and downtown because the Saints had a home game and it was crazy down there, but we did get beignets for breakfast, which for some reason we had never tried while we lived there (which is probably a good thing because they seem like they could be addictive and aren't exactly healthy :-). They're a fried donut with powdered sugar piled on top, kind of like a funnel cake. We had an awesome weekend and it was great to be able to spend time with friends!

Renee in Scottsdale

Renee was in Scottsdale this past week and although she did not get an opportunity to drape exotic animals about her neck (and wouldn't have even if the opportunity presented itself :-) she did get a chance to take some pretty pictures of the sunset.