//------------------------------// // August 9 [New Flight Gear] // Story: Silver Glow's Journal // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// August 9 Meghan ignored her first alarm, and after she'd turned it off I asked her why she even set it if she was never going to get up when it went off. Why not set it ten minutes later and get up then? She said that it was because she wanted that ten minutes to be awake and snuggling with me, and then she kissed my forehead. I kissed her back and then put my wing across her belly and gave her a little wing-hug and we snuggled together until her alarm went off again. When she was in the shower I went downstairs and got breakfast ready, then I went back upstairs and picked out clothes for her. She liked what I picked and said I was getting good at choosing her clothes. I said I still thought it was more sensible to not wear clothes. After we'd eaten we washed the dishes together and then went out on the porch to wait for her friend. It was a beautiful day out, and I was really looking forward to flying. Once her friend had arrived, I nuzzled her hip to say goodbye and then took off for home. I had to fill the birdfeeder, and after I'd done mine I went over to Aric's and filled his up, too. There were just some empty shells on the workbench, so I guess mister mouse had found them. I swept those off with my wingtip and then left him some more. I thought I'd do medium-length flights today, and relax in between. That way I wouldn't wind up tiring myself out. Going west first would be easiest, so I filled up my camelback and put on my flight gear and then called Dori and told her that I was planning to fly over Stadium Drive and then along the 94 Highway until I got past Three Rivers, and then turn around and come back. She told me to have a safe flight and keep under a thousand until I crossed the 131 Highway. I liked it better when I was allowed to climb up early, but I said that was okay, and I dropped off my balcony and under the tree and wires, then up into the sky. It was a beautiful day for flying—even before I got much above the trees, I could see how blue and open the sky was and it was days like this that I felt like I could fly forever. I'd made it all the way to where Stadium Drive crosses the 131 Highway and I was just starting to climb when I heard my pocket telephone ringing in my saddlebags. If I'd been higher, I would have ignored it, but I'd decided to keep even lower over the city, and was only a few hundred feet up, so I wasn't going to lose much by landing to see who had called. So I circled back, and landed in the grass by Costco and got my pocket telephone out. It was Mister Salvatore and he said that had gotten my navigation watch and portable GPS, and that he could bring them to me or I could come to his office and get them. Well, I was eager to see what he had gotten, so I called him back and said that I would meet him at his office in about a sixth of an hour, and then I used my airplane radio to call Dori back and tell her that I was going to have to stop my morning flight, and she was a little bit worried so I told her that it wasn't anything bad but I had to pick up some new flight gear that had just come in for me. When you want directions on the ground, you want to ask an earth pony 'cause they always seem to know where the roads go and what's the best way even if it's not obvious. But in the air you can't beat a pegasus who knows her territory. So I turned around on the lawn until I was pointed almost right at Mister Salvatore's office and I took off, making a little detour around a light post that was inconveniently in my way, and kept my eyes fixed on the sky until I was high enough up that I could see all the way over to where I knew his office was to see how well I'd done at guessing the bearing. I was pretty close. Humans measure the compass in 360 degrees, and I was only off by one or two from my first, on-the-ground guess. It was only a trio of miles, so I didn't get very high. There wasn't any point; I would waste just as much effort getting up out of ground turbulence as I would flying through it. Even though I hadn't planned it, I liked the course I took, 'cause it was mostly over lots of neighborhoods with trees, a park, and by the golf course where I'd gotten yelled at. I thought about making a little low arc over it just to annoy them, but there was already a hawk circling there who might have had the same idea. I came down around the front of their building, which faces the 94 Highway. I made a big circle to lose altitude and I came a bit closer to the highway than I'd meant to and got a bit of an unplanned sideways boost from the wind blowing off a big truck. Miss Cherilyn was waiting in the lobby for me and she said that Mister Salvatore was upstairs, playing with the new toys. She took me up to their office and sure enough, Mister Salvatore had a watch in his hands and he was looking at a big sheet of paper with little tiny writing on it and then pushing buttons on the watch. And he also had another little flat thing that was kind of like my portable telephone. Well, I thought that Mister Salvatore wasn't just playing but that he had figured out how they worked, 'cause once he looked up and saw me he had me sit down in a chair next to him and he showed me how to use them. He said that he had also gotten an extended wristband for the watch so that it would fit around my leg, and we tried that first 'cause it was made for pilots. It could tell you your altitude, and you could put in an airport code and it would tell you what direction it was. He showed me with Kalamazoo's airport, and showed how when he turned around it changed what the bearing was. And there were buttons on the side that you could push to show where the airport or waypoint you wanted to visit were, or another button that would show you how to get to the nearest airport, which would be useful if I got lost. It didn't say how fast I was going, though, and it also didn't have a very good map. It showed a couple of little points but that was all. Still, it was not as bulky as the altimeter I had on, and it hardly weighed anything. Mister Salvatore explained how for all the functions to work properly it had to talk to my portable telephone, and he said that we could learn how to use that together, but that it didn't need to talk to my telephone to show my bearing or altitude. And then we tried out the GPS. It didn't show airports, but it had a good ground map and it also could show altitude, and since it had a bigger picture, it could show more things. He said that I ought to try both of them out and see which I liked best, so he put the watch on one foreleg, right where I usually wore my altimeter, and the other one on my other leg, where my weather radio usually goes. I said that I was planning a couple of medium flights for today to get ready for tomorrow. And then I nuzzled him and Miss Cherilyn, too. I got permission to fly again; staying low was even more important now than it had been before, because I was closer to the airport. So I took off and followed the 94 Highway, about six hundred feet up. The bigger display on the watch was nice, and since it was lighted it would be easier to see at night. I had to be careful not to get distracted with my new navigation equipment, because even though it knew where I was, it didn't know who else might be in the air around me. Well, I couldn't say for sure that it was enough to keep me from being lost—I think the only way to test that would be to get lost and then see if the GPS could find me—but I did find that the watch was very good at knowing where the Kalamazoo airport was, and when I was in Three Rivers and picked the nearest airport it gave me a bearing to the grass runway that was near Mattawan. At least that looked like where it was suggesting. I kind of wanted to have both with me but I thought for a flight to Chicago, the little watch was going to be more useful 'cause it was so small and light. But I think for storms the GPS might work better. I circled around with my hoof held out in front of me and watched the bearing numbers change, then I went back along the highway and then home. Since I was going to go out flying again, I didn't want to eat too big a lunch, so I ate some hay and took a short nap in the papasan, then had a little bit more hay, and read the manual for the watch. It was really long and complicated, because the watch was so smart. It even said that it could keep track of how far I swam, which was a feature I hoped I wasn't going to need. I experimented with it, to make sure that I could make it do what I wanted it to. It knew if I was flying by how fast I climbed, but I had to change its setting because I didn't think that I could ever manage to climb five hundred fifty feet per minute, unless I dove first to get some speed, or found a really good updraft in a thunderstorm. Even though I hadn't figured out all the functions, I did want to get flying again before it was too late, so I refilled my camelback, and got dressed in my flight gear again. This time I went northwest—I thought I'd fly to Allegan and then turn around there. So I told my watch to find the Allegan airport, and then I asked the airplane directors if I could fly to Allegan and they said that I could. Rather than follow a road directly, I trusted my watch to point me the right way, and tried to pay as little attention to the ground as I could. It wasn't a great test, because it was really hard to avoid the instinct of looking down and finding the landmarks on the ground, especially since I had to always look around me to make sure that there weren't any other airplanes around. And when I got close, there were other airplanes around. The watch told me when I was ten miles from the airport so I called out my position on my radio and another airplane warned me that there were skydivers in the area. They were pretty easy to find, when I thought to look down, because their parachutes were big and bright. But I'd thought they'd be higher up, and it turned out it was really hard to spot a falling person in the air. I probably wouldn't have seen any of them if I hadn't heard their airplane and focused in on where the sound was. I guess that they fall down from a high altitude and open their parachutes at a low altitude. I didn't want to get too close to them, so I circled the opposite way that it was flying, and I told them where I was going so that they would know. Even from a safe distance, it was neat to see their parachutes balloon open and watch them drift down. I watched until I didn't see any more parachutes, and the airplane that the people had been jumping out of went back to the airport. Then I turned around and went back towards Kalamazoo. I followed my watch for a little while, and then I could see Kalamazoo, so I went the rest of the way visually, 'cause I knew that I'd be doing the same tomorrow—I'd set the watch to point me to Chicago, and at some point over the lake, I'd see it, and then I'd be able to fly visually towards the skyscratchers. Once I got close to Kalamazoo, I started a long descent, making a little bit of a course correction when I found the Kalamazoo College bell tower, and then I skimmed over the tops of the trees in my neighborhood before dropping under the canopy at my backyard. I cut it a little bit too close and got some leaves for my trouble, but at least it was only with my hooves and not my face. Trees looked kind of soft when you were above them but they really weren't. I cooled down in the shower, even though it was pretty late to be taking a shower, and then I sat on my bed and read the rest of the instructions for the watch, to make sure that I understood everything that it could do, and then when I'd figured it all out I preened my wings. Before I went to bed, I made sure to put it in its little cradle, so that it would be ready for the morning, and I also put new batteries in my blinking light. I had a hard time getting to sleep 'cause I was really looking forward to flying tomorrow, and after I'd laid in bed for a while I got back up and went to the kitchen and set out a couple of cans of anchovies for tomorrow and I don't know why that made me feel less restless, but it did, and when I got back in bed I fell asleep pretty quickly.