Eight months later, I traveled back to MDI. I flew the NSAC Cessna with my family and stayed overnight. It was a trip planned in a hurry.
Initially we planned to fly to Baltimore (Essex W48), but the weather was not cooperative there. It was sunny, too sunny, hot and humid in the South. Essex has a relatively short runway on which I could envision myself in distress on the day of return, when it was predicted to be ninty-five degrees and humid. Cessna Skyhawk does not perform well in these conditions when loaded to max gross weight (which it was). So the other destination selected was Bar Harbor (MDI), where temperatures were close to seventy. However, it was predicted that an occluded front will pass over Maine one day after we return back. I needed to keep an eye on the front in case it moved in quicker than expected. An aviator needs to be a meteorologist especially when visual flying is the only option.
The route of flight was over the coast from Beverly to Plum Island, Salisbury, Kennebunk, Portland, Rockland, and then to the Bar Harbor airport. It was very clear, and smooth. Momina is now getting quite comfortable with flying, so she snapped some good pictures of various stunning Maine beaches. The segment of flight from Plum Island to Kennebunk has some of the best views one can experience in flight. The flight leg from Portland to Bar Harbor is not as exciting as you fly mostly over water and some Islands, with mostly rocky beaches.
We took off at about nine in the morning, and landed in Bar Harbor at about eleven. MDI has free buses running throughout the island from dawn till dusk. We took a bus from the airport to our hotel, unloaded our luggage, then took another bus to Sand Beach. This is a famous beach in MDI, and offers unobstructed views of the ocean and the mountains. It was a bit crowded though. Kids played in the water, we did some small hikes, then took the bus back to the hotel.
Bar Harbor has excellent restaurants, and all of them serve pretty good food at a very reasonable price. We had lunch at "Side Street Cafe", and dinner at "Geddy's". After the dinner, we walked around the town. The shops in downtown Bar Harbor were open till eleven at night. The streets were full of life. It was breezy and pleasant. To bed at about midnight, dead tired of all the activities during the day.
We enjoyed an excellent breakfast at "Cafe This Way", after which I checked the weather. The cool breeze that we enjoyed the previous night had brought the weather front quicker than expected, and we had to cut short our trip by one day to get home just before the rain and thunder arrived.
Momina briefly took control of the yoke on the way back. We passed along some low clouds, some of which had smooth round edges, which I expected to present some turbulence. But it was very smooth, and Momina navigated around the clouds while I concentrated on snapping some pictures.
I usually do not make mistakes in flying, but this time, I made two mistakes.
I contacted Portland tower directly while I should have called Portland approach to get clearance in class C airspace. I was asked by the tower to contact the approach instead.
and
When I was passing over Rockland at fifteen hundred feet AGL, I tuned to the Rockland common frequency and announced my position periodically, while keeping eye on the two planes that were in the pattern there, but neither of which were announcing their positions. It felt weird to me, but some time later I found that I had turned the radio volume all the way down to listen to Zain, and then had forgotten to turn it back up.
Here are some pictures from the trip (click on a picture to enlarge it):
