Getting up in the morning and looking at the weather is always how it starts. “Do we want to go flying today,” my husband and I exchange our favorite sentence. Weather looks okay, but just locally. Snow and freezing temperatures to the east and thunderstorms to the south make traveling those directions challenging. We look at weather to the north and it’s a relatively clear path for the majority of the day. Bellingham? Skagit? Arlington? We have never been to Bellingham before and initial research looks intriguing. We do the basics: Weather, Notams, Check the airport info and in no time we’re off to our airport. We pre-flight, load the car seat, and make sure that the Little Dude has everything he needs for this quick: 32 minute flight. Half tanks are more than enough for this segment, and often our plan is to purchase fuel from where we plan on borrowing a crew car.
The Little Dude is super cute getting ready for this trip. He grabs the instruction book for the fuel flow instrument and a pencil and tells us about our schedule. We load up The Little Dude with his essentials (I pad, Headphones) and off we go.
The weather is high overcast today but very VFR. We don’t get much winter flying in the PNW because of icing conditions and our lack of deicing equipment, so in our trip planning we err on the side of caution with frozen precipitation in this airplane. It is a smooth flight all the way to Bellingham with a nice path taking us over Lake Sammamish, the Skagit Valley, and nearly directly into a straight in final to runway 34 at Bellingham. The Little Dude is content playing his new paw patrol game and John and I elect not to use flight following. The best part of flying with a 3 year old is that he claps every time we land and that never gets old. After landing we taxi over to Bellingham Aviation Services / Command Aviation to being our exploration of the area. This is the first place we have been that there are 2 separate FBO’s operating out of the same building and we found this a little confusing at first. We didn’t know where the line girl who came out to park us was from. The line girl was from BAS and we found that the services and personnel at BAS were fantastic. They offered us a courtesy car and as soon as we swapped the car seat from the plane to the car, off we went.
Since we already had lunch, the $100 hamburger was out. Instead, we decided to head to the down town area to roam. Using Trip Advisor, we found Mallards Ice cream, I’ve never had such a difficult time deciding on a flavor. (Except for maybe at Mora’s on Bainbridge island) We walked to the Bellingham’s farmers market which was nice, but seemed a little out of season. From there we decided to drive to the Historic Fairhaven district. It was a super condensed and tiny version of the original downtown. As we passed through Fairhaven we decided to pass through Fairhaven Park, when Huxley noticed the playground. We let him play for a bit on the great equipment and friendly park visited by many. There’s a nice little river that passes through the park with trails throughout. It is funny how fast 2 hours can go, and we are often surprised how fast we have to return the crew cars! We loaded up and decided to go back to the plane as a bit of weather was moving into the Seattle area and we didn’t want to get stuck. Upon our arrival back to the airport, the FBO was super easy, already had the plane gassed up for us so we paid, pre-flighted and were back in the air to S50.
Our return was about 45 minutes since we did some sight seeing.
The Little Dude decided to take a nap on the flight back. We landed back home at S50 and pushed the plane back in the hangar. The Little Dude was sad, he missed the return flight due to his nap. But next weekend is looking clear, so we will see where the winds take us.
I tried to take more photos on this trip as we introduced Instagram in connection to our site.
Family Tips:
BVS has 2 courtesy cars (a old cop car and a Lincoln Continental.) We had no problem installing the Diono Radian RXT in the Lincoln.
