About three years ago Sue got her pilot's license, and acquired a third
share in a Piper PA-250 Comanche. Shortly later, she acquired another
third when one partner lost his medical, and the final third when the other
wanted to move on. Needless to say, her free time has been devoted
to flying and to related activities like studying for the instrument rating.
Though I have no ambition to be a pilot, I've been spending a lot of time in the air with her. As well as many "hundred dollars hamburger" flights to Clair County Airport, Jackson, Muskegon, and Traverse City -- restaurants on or near the runway -- we flew to Denver, where we spent some time with my youngest daughter Romy and her husband Matt.
Sue got her mountain flying checkride (I rode in the back seat), which
included landings at Leadville (left) and Aspen. Leadville has the
highest-altitude paved runway in North America, and you can't see Aspen's
runway until the last minute, when the valley winds around a rather large
chunk of mountain. Flying through narrow passes was like Star Wars, but
with real rocks fifty feet off the wing tip and several hundred feet above,
instead of a fat guy in the next theater seat, with greasy yellow popcorn.
Sue passed her instrument check ride this past New Year's Day, but she wasn't able to fly again until mid April. The Comanche remained in Michigan (8D4, Sparta Airport) but...
In mid-January Sue started a new job in South Florida. I bought a house in Pompano Beach, then flew (commercial) back to Grand Rapids, where I spent the next three months packing and shipping things south.
In April she returned to pick up the Comanche. We flew it to its new home, within walking distance of ours -- the flight path from the north-south runway goes right overhead.
Before the move took over all my time and mental energy (and some I didn't have to spare) I was working on three projects: the Hallstatt Iron Age novel, Salt, a rewrite of the sequel to Bright Islands in a Dark Sea, and a fourth book in the Arbiter series. Salt is under contract to Baen Books; I don't have a publisher for either of the others, but when the time comes I hope to sell the reprint rights to Bright Islands and the first three Arbiter books as well.
I think the Florida sunshine will be good for me and my writing: West Michigan's winter gloom definitely wasn't!
L. Warren Douglas
April 17th, 2005
New address:
720 NE 31st Street,
Pompano Beach, FL 33064
Phone: (954) 579-7434