Finally a nice day in the PNW! A few days of sun in the Seattle area and all the pilots take to the skies! We’re up for a short lunch trip and somewhere new. Chehalis airport has been on our list since the airport is located right next to a golf course that you can walk a short distance to. It is a short flight from home base and doesn’t require a rental or courtesy car.
We’re also super excited that our friends the Birdie family are able to fly to Chehalis too and join us for lunch.
We head to the airport with the beco carrier, a backpack and a strider bike. It’s a short 25 minutes to KCLS from S50. The airport is quite busy with helicopter traffic when we want to depart, but we finally get a window. We take off north and turn south. We have to stay a bit east of our direct course to avoid the Seattle Bravo airspace. It’s one of the first nice weekend days in a while so there is plenty of traffic out. We are again thankful for our adsb and being able to know where traffic is along our route.
No one in the plane family has been to KCLS before so we approach with caution. It’s left traffic for runway 34 and we haven’t heard any one on the shared CTAF for KCLS. We enter a left downwind and notice that Chehalis is in a bit of a valley with small mountainous terrain on both sides.
We land and roll all the way to the end. The transient parking and FBO and fuel are towards runway 16. We park close to the fuel farm and notice stairs just behind the fuel farm. We wait just a bit for our friends to land and then rally the kids for the very short walk to the riverbend golf course restaurant.
We walk by the putting green and driving range and into an open dining area. It’s 1pm and we have the family dining area downstairs to ourselves. The dining area is very welcoming and we order our lunch. The kids food comes out first and then the rest. All the food was very good, the service was a bit slow, but when you are with friends that’s okay.
It’s cold outside! But the little dude brought his tiny putter to play some golf and his friend brought a ball, perfect! We let the older kids practice their putting and play in the sand trap, but it’s a bit cold for the babies. A short 2 minutes up and down the stairs across an old train track and we are back at the airport and the planes. Time to say goodbye and load up and head home.
