This last Sunday morning, it being Father's Day, Ethel decided that I had enough life insurance such that she wanted me to go up in an ultralight with my friend Bob.      
                            

Here we are at Circle Mountain International Airport - the fuselage, the wing, and Bob's behind.

It's not really an "ultralight"; it's a "sports plane". An ultralight only has one seat, while a sports plane has two seats. Since it can carry a passenger under power, a sports plane has to have an N-number and the pilot has to be licensed.

So Bob actually went to the extra expense and trouble of buying a more expensive vehicle, getting a pilot's license, and getting the plane registered, in order to be able to take other people flying with him. Bob is obviously one of the good guys :)

This sports plane doesn't have a joystick - instead, the pilot holds on to the wing's lower frame directly, which is why you'll see Bob's hand in a lot of these pictures:

                     

This was right after we took off. Taking off in a sports plane is a lot like getting onto a ride at an amusement park, except that you don't have to stand in line and the pilot seems a lot more sober than the ride attendants often do. But there's still that feeling of BOUNCE and a disconnection with solid earth; taking off in a commercial airliner, it's hard to tell when one has actually left the earth. Not so in a sports plane :)

We circled Apache Peak, and Bob showed me how the  trail goes up; I'm gonna get Ethel and Silas to climb this with me as soon as we have a day in which the temperature stays in two digits:

                  

That neighborhood behind the mountain is Circle Mountain - the next thing we did was fly over the Chocolate House and buzz Ethel and the doggies :)

                 

The white dot on the porch is Ethel; the black dot in front of her is Maia, wondering why Daddy is up in the air. BTW - the house to the east (to your left) is still for sale, built by the same guy. JimBob and Ethel give him two thumbs up.

From up here, one can really see that my house has a northeast orientation for the back porch (the street in front runs due east-west). A good bit of the desert to the northwest of my house is part of my lot - I don't know what I'm gonna DO with it, but it's nice to have it.


Leaving Ethel behind, we flew out into the Tonto National Forest, where Bob was pointing out many of the Indian ruins and petroglyph locations. Here's some neat ruins on top of Chinaman's Hat:

                    

                

Looking at the ridgetop, you can see a large room (of course, it doesn't have a roof - Indians don't need roofs. Roofs are for sissy Euros :)

            

Looking at this ridgetop, you can see a long wall; this is actually not but an hour or so hike from the house, but I can't get Ethel to put down the bonbons and get off of the couch, so we may never actually make it up there.

Riding up out of the Tonto basin onto the top of New River Mesa, I see some stuff that looks like it might be interesting climbing....

            

...those spires might be a lot of fun. Then we came up onto the top of the mesa:

           

and it wasn't long after this that suddenly I got airsick. Not "throwing up" airsick, but "gee, it's not any fun to try to look through this viewfinder" airsick. So I don't have any pictures of the top of the mesa, or the new long rock walls we found in some hidden canyons (no way to tell if they've ever been seen before) or the view coming into Carefree from the north or Cave Creek or coming back down to Circle Mountain International; nope. As the flight progressed, my interest in bird's-eye photography diminished.

When we got back to the landing strip, we couldn't land - there were folks on horseback moving at a leisurely pace along the runway. So we got to make another pass (by this time, I was reaching the "ohmigodi'mgonnathrowupnow" stage of airsickness)  and when we finally landed, we BOUNCED. Not a bad bounce, but  - an interesting bounce.

I'm not done here - I'm gonna get some Dramamine patches and put one behind my ear, and do this again.