August 1 [Flight to Indiana]
August 1
Monday morning wasn't as relaxing as Sunday morning had been. Meghan's alarm woke us both up, and we could only snuggle until it went off the second time, and then she had to get up so that she would have enough time to take a shower and get ready for work.
But we had our morning routine pretty well established, and so I got breakfast set out and then brushed her hair and didn't help her dress because that would have slowed her down (I helped a little by getting out underwear that I liked). And after breakfast we'd been working together so well that we had a little time to snuggle before her friend came, but I had to be careful not to mess up her hair or her clothes.
I flew low back to my apartment and then got all my gear together. If things went well, this was going to be the longest flight I'd ever accomplished on Earth. I was pretty sure I could do it, as long as I didn't do anything dumb.
I got all my gear ready, and I thought about taking some food along, although it would be really difficult to get to it in flight. That was something I would have to think about when the time came to fly to Chicago; I couldn't count on there being a cloud where I could land and have a snack, and I really didn't want to land on a boat if I could help it.
So then I thought that the smartest idea would be to take some food in case I needed it, but to hopefully not eat any of it, and if I could do that, I knew that I could make Chicago.
I had to take my airplane radio, but I left the other behind, and I thought about leaving the GoPro, too, but it really didn't weigh all that much and it wasn't really in the way when I flew.
I called the airplane directors and said what I was going to do, and they gave me permission to fly. Dori said that it would be okay to fly southwest to the 131 Highway, climbing over town, as long as I looked out for other airplanes and could get there in less than a half hour. I said that I would—if I got over the 131 Highway where it crossed the 94 Highway, I could do that in less than a half hour, even climbing all the way, without pushing myself too much for so early in the trip.
She said that would put me in their control zone for my climbout, and she could keep other airplanes away from me.
I thanked her and she wished me good luck on my flight, and then I took off from the balcony, went under the tree and the power wires, then started climbing. I couldn't see the highway yet but I was familiar enough with this part of Kalamazoo that I knew where it was even when I couldn't see it.
I did a real slow, gentle climb, to save energy, and when I got over Western Michigan University, I changed my course a little bit to take advantage of the weak thermal over their parking lots. It was too early to get much of anything off it, because the sun hadn't really had a chance to warm it up, but I'd take whatever free energy I could get.
By the time I'd gotten to the little curve of lakes and woods near the intersection, I was at four thousand feet, and I called Dori and told her where I was and how high I was flying, and then I crossed over the highways and kept climbing. I only had to change course a little bit to stay alongside the 131 Highway, because it turned right near that intersection.
I topped out at about five thousand feet, because I didn't think it was worth it to gain much more altitude. The winds were a little bit from the west but not too much—if they'd been stronger, I would have tried to fly over or under them to get more favorable conditions.
I let Dori know when I'd passed by the pair of lakes off to the east of the 131 Highway, because that was about where the airport's air control area ended. And then I kept going.
I knew Schoolcraft kinda well, since I'd flown over it before, but after that the land got a little bit unfamiliar. It was lots more fields, mostly, with rows of trees along the boundaries of them, and sometimes also patches of forest that stretched across a lot of fields.
There was a set of railroad tracks that ran kind of parallel to the highway, and another set that crossed them on the south side of Schoolcraft, and it was kind of nice to be following them along with the highway. I was pretty sure that this was the same tracks that ran alongside the river trail where me and Meghan had been walking yesterday, and as I flew my mind kind of wandered and I thought that maybe if she should have followed the tracks instead of the trail. Trails didn't always go anywhere interesting, but railroad tracks usually did, because it was a lot more work to build them.
The highway made a couple of jogs, but the railroad tracks stayed straight until I could see Three Rivers ahead of me, and then they curved off and I lost them in town, because they were going southeast and I was going southwest.
South of town the highway turned again, to avoid a big boggy area around some curves in a river, and then it turned again to go around the next town, which was called Constantine.
I followed it around the edge of town, even though I could have taken a shortcut. I didn't want to, because when I was flying over Lake Michigan, there weren't going to be any shortcuts.
I paid attention to the curves of the road and what buildings on the ground were easy to see from the air. And I also looked behind me every now and then to get a sense of what things would look like when I went the other way, because sometimes what seemed like an obvious landmark when you were flying one way wasn't so obvious when you were going back the other way.
I passed by another town that was on my east which I knew was called White Pigeon, and that was right near the border of Indiana, and the 80 90 Highway wasn't too far beyond that. I could see a big road that I thought was probably it ahead of me, but I couldn't be sure until I got closer.
The tracks crossed the highway south of White Pigeon and raced off to the southwest, and I didn't think I'd be seeing them again once I'd crossed over them. They were going through fields and not around a river or anything, which meant that their next destination wasn't along the 131 Highway.
And then the 131 Highway made another big curve to the west, and before it straightened all the way back out again, it crossed the 80 90 Highway, so I made a big turn and then started going north again.
I had assumed that the border between Michigan and Indiana would have been pretty obvious, but I couldn't see anything that looked like it was a border. The boundaries of fields weren't in a constant straight line except for where a road ran alongside a couple of fields, but none of the roads went far enough to be roads at the border. But I was sure I'd crossed it; there hadn't been any other big highways on the map. And it felt like I'd flown far enough to be there.
I circled again while I tried to decide if it was worth dropping down far enough to clearly read the signs on the highway, but I decided not to. I was sure that this was it; I could account for all the towns I should have passed on my way.
So when my circle pointed me back north, I flew off along the 131 Highway again.
The highway was such an easy path to follow, I think I could have not bothered looking at landmarks on my way down.
Like I had when I flew to Grand Rapids, I followed some cars with my eyes for as long as I could. There was a big boxy ambulance with its lights flashing that passed under me just after I got to Constantine, and I could see it all the way until it got off the highway in Three Rivers.
And after that, a train came along the tracks from behind me, and it wasn't going all that fast. A little bit faster than me, and it was long enough that I could barely see the front of it, but then it slowed down and stopped, and before I'd gotten back to the front of it, I saw another train crossing in front of it, through Schoolcraft.
I wonder how trains decide who gets to go first? They have signal lights like for cars, but I don't think that train signals go through a cycle like car signals do.
I could see Kalamazoo ahead of me, and I was glad for that, because I was starting to get a little bit tired. I still had a ways to go, too.
Once I was past Schoolcraft, I called Dori and told here where I was and how high I was flying, and she said that I could keep on my course, and that I should give her a call again when I got over the 131 and 94 Highway crossing, and she'd see if she could give me a vector straight in.
And she asked how I was feeling, and I said that I was tired, but I was feeling pretty proud of myself for having flown all that distance.
I was out of water in my camelback, and I was starting to get thirsty, and it was kind of tempting to try and rush for home, but I'd just wind up exhausting myself quicker if I did.
When I got over the crossing, I called her again and she said I could make a descending straight-in approach to my apartment, and that was good news because that meant I could glide some of the remaining distance. Of course the wind had shifted a little bit and now it was almost in my face, robbing me of speed.
There was a trick to use headwinds to your advantage, and I knew some of the mares on my team had known how to do it, but I'd never figured out how to do it right, and now wasn't the time to try and learn a new trick, so I just kept flying, over the little winding neighborhoods and then over Western Michigan's campus, angling towards the bright green tennis courts at the edge, which almost line me up with my apartment.
My landing back on my balcony wasn't especially graceful, but that was okay. I called Dori one last time and told her that I'd landed, and then I went inside and stripped off my gear and went right to the shower. I was covered in lather and my wings didn't want to pull all the way in, and my throat was completely dry so I stepped right into the bathtub and held my head up and caught the water in my mouth and drank a little bit, then let the water run over me. I think that I was steaming a little bit, I was so hot, and I knew I'd be sore tomorrow. Even so, I was really happy because I'd gone about a hundred miles, and I hadn't stopped once, which meant that I could make it to Chicago.
I was going to have to call Mister Salvatore and tell him.
I thought about when I wanted to go while I was rinsing off. Not before I went to Stratford, that was for sure. I could take it easy tomorrow, do some light wing exercise and legwork, and then another long flight on Wednesday to make sure I was ready, then I'd have a long weekend to relax, and I could fly over the lake on Monday or Tuesday, depending on when we got back and what the weather was like.
When I got out of the shower, I put my towel over my back and went into the unused bedroom to snack on some hay, then I laid on my back on the futon and stretched out my wings. It took a bit of shifting around to find a comfortable position, and no matter what I did, they'd get sore if I left them in one position too long, so I kept having to adjust myself a little bit.
I got up after about an hour and had another snack and drink of water, then I tried to decide if it was worth it to go to the store to get more food for dinner, or just eat what I had and buy some fresh food at the farmer's market tomorrow.
The second idea was more appealing to me, so I opened the balcony door to let more breeze in and set the papasan right next to it and got a book of Kipling's poems and read through it, letting my imagination wander.
I wonder what he would have thought about flying along over a highway? I think he would have liked it.
By the time I'd finished the poems in the book, I was hungry for dinner, so I went and made a plate of vegetables and put more hay on them and ate that in the papasan chair, then I sent a telephone telegram to Meghan letting her know that I'd had a really good flight today and asking if she'd made us a spa appointment, and she said that she had, and that it was this Wednesday.
That was good, 'cause I'd be well-groomed for our visit to Gusty.
I made sure that it was late enough that I could do a long flight and then I thought that I ought to tell Mister Salvatore that I was ready to fly to Chicago next week, but I decided that I could just as easily tell him tomorrow, and I was getting kind of sleepy, so I closed the balcony door because I didn't want to wake up with a bird nesting in my mane, and curled up on my futon.
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Thinking about it, Pegasi in Equestria have some sort of airbag effect that protects them in crashes. It's not perfect (Dash ends up in the hospital in Read It and Weep) but they don't get killed as often as you'd think.
How effective is that in Earth's lower magic field?
Maybe?
It's actually closer to 80 miles, the minimum she needs is about 105. I really hope that Mr Salvatore is going to have a support vessel nearby because with SG working at her limit and being over open water, this could go bad real quick. Will she stop for a rest on the east shore of the lake? Somewhere like Benton Harbor?
Fort Wayne is roughly equidistant. They have A-10's there, too.
I couldn't count on their being a cloud -- there
Now if only there were a Taco Bell floating in the air with a fly-through lane, Silver Glow would have everything she needed to fly to Chicago.
The area is so confusing and large, that Silver is wanting to fly accross the lake to get to chicago, yet theres an Indiana to Michigan canal to the south west of Chicago, the far side of the city to the lake?
Or did I leave the canal in the wrong place when moving the satelite view round again?
You dont have to be all that far off track in certain places to have an awful long way to go due to the coast curving?
Maybe Mr Salvatore would like to go for a holiday with one of those two man racing hovercraft? We dont see much of those for some reason. Those and flying boats, autogyros and other non airport landing fee transport?
Silver Glow's journal, or How I stopped worrying and loved the clothes.
7614229
"They have A10s there."
But hasn't Silver already been to an aircraft museum?
7614192 it really depends on your interpretation (although I don't rember what Admiral Biscuit has said on the topic). I've been going more with an increased drain and effort more than a reduction in effect.
I think it might be less of an issue with her getting where she wants to go but more of a problem cooling down at the other side. It sounds like she could hurt herself if she doesn't have a chance to wash off at the other end and wind down at her destination.
Because having that happen once is enough.
well i wonder when Silver is going to get a pair of binoculars, so she can spot signs on the ground from her altitude.
7614364 maybe she has a friend called "Pillow Case" ?
Just a reminder to Biscuit that on June 20 SG was going to go to the library to start reading the WW1 book but she hasn't quite made it there yet.
Are aircraft that fly over water required to have flotation devices for each passenger and pilot?
7614374
That was Cato. He wasn't even a consul.
7615355 Yes, I know. But the guy who did destroy Carthago was Scipio. The third punic war was just Rome wanting to destroy whatever remain there was of their old rival.
"Not that I care what some unicorn thinks of how I look." *preens*
7615632 But she does care about looking good at the theatre.
7615196 Obviously the silly looking binocular glasses are the best choice. I wonder if a unicorn could enchant a bag of holding for here, for all the gear she's (hypothetically) going to be carrying before the end of her stay on earth.
eyeglassbinoculars.com/neckStrap1.jpg
missing period.
Oh yeah! Silver finally getting ready to fly over Lake Michigan to Chicago is gonna be the highlight of her life!
7614192
I don't know; some of that might be blamed on the medium. Without Y-rated cartoon physics, a crashing Pegasus could be in much more trouble than Rainbow Dash is on the show.
Though since their flight is magically aided and they can literally walk on clouds, the airbag theory isn't very far out.
7616864 In the Project Sunflower story Pegasi alter wind resistance around themselves magically. If they created a bubble of thick air around them maybe that would act like an airbag.
7616119 It's the Earth Ponies who can pull items out of nowhere.
Maybe that's just Pinkie.
"So when my circle pointed me back north, I flew off along the 131 Highway again."
We used to call I-70 the Concrete VOR, because for the most part it goes straight East/West from where we were to where we wanted to go. They were a lot more handy than Non-Directional Beacons (NDB), which were just radio stations, and didn't give you a vector. All of this fun stuff is being phased out now because of GPS, although most hands-on VFR (Visual Flight Rules) traffic in clear weather (at least around here) consists of an experienced pilot just flying in the direction of where they want to go, since Kansas is literally flatter than a pancake and you can normally see the city an hour or two before you reach it. In the dark, it's even better, because a city skyglow shows over the horizon.
... I didn't want to wake up with a bird nesting in my mane...
Yeah, Equestrian hair care has *just* a few more strange problems than humans have to deal with.
7614184
Oops.
When you're looking for someone to give you directions, I am probably about the worst choice. Ah well, it's fixed now.
7614192
Since I like to take some of the cartoon physics out of it, Silver Glow has no airbag effect. If she hits the ground too hard, she breaks bones or dies. And even with that effect, fighting storms over the ocean, even making a safe landing in the water might not save you; it'll just lead to more suffering before the end.
7614227
That's the way I would say it, so I guess it's colloquial.
Correction made!
Yeah, you're right. She estimated wrong on her distance, figuring that the turns in 131 made it longer than it really was.
She's not planning on flying a continuous roundtrip over Lake Michigan. She's either going to take a train back from Chicago, or ride the boat back, or stay overnight and fly back the next day. So she can do it with 80 miles worth of endurance if she leaves from South Haven, although she's smart enough to know that she'll want more, to deal with headwinds and navigation issues. Or Benton Harbor would be a smarter place to leave from, since that would cut the distance down to about sixty miles.
And yes, Mister Salvatore won't let her even try without a boat following her on the lake, so she's got somewhere to land if things go wrong.
7614229
Kalamazoo to Ft. Wayne is outside of her round-trip distance at the moment; even a straight-line flight is over 80 miles one way.
Incidentally, one of the data centers my internet comes through is in Ft. Wayne, and based on the targeted ads on Facebook, at least one ad service thinks that Ft. Wayne and Ft. Worth are the same place.
7614252
Stupid homonyms. gDocs probably caught that, too, but I missed it. Ah well; it's fixed now. Thank you!
I'm picturing a Taco Bell held up by lots of helium balloons. Like the house in Up.
7614299
That was to connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi, and it's been replaced with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Which is a way for Asian carp to get to the Great Lakes, but so far it's still open.
That's very true. If she left from Benton Harbor instead of South Haven, she'd shave 20 miles off her flight.
I've seen enough pictures of what happens to racing catamarans when they hit a wave wrong to not have any real desire to try a racing hovercraft. I figure that they're probably expensive and will kill you.
7614364
Silver Glow's journal, or How I stopped worrying and loved the clothes.
7614712
She's been to one. For sheer volume of aircraft, Wright-Patterson in Dayton might be her best bet--I don't know if it's the biggest, but it's pretty large.
I don't think that the Air Zoo has an A-10.
7614746
I don't think I've said anything other than it being a little bit harder for her to fly on Earth, without ever going into the why.
7614900
If she puts that much effort into a flight and has no cooldown afterwards, she's got a good chance of getting cramps, not to mention being unpleasant and sweaty for quite some time after as he body cools off naturally. It won't necessarily be harmful, but it will be unpleasant, and will probably result in her having to take a few days off from flying.
7615033
Exactly!
7615196
Thus adding to her load of flight gear.
7615233
She's had lofty goals of finishing the Bible first (not likely), and has been spending a lot of time flying and doing other fun stuff. But she hasn't forgotten that she wants to do it, she just hasn't been prioritizing it.
7615312
As far as I know, only if they're commercial. Any prudent private pilot would, just in case, but I'm not sure it's an actual requirement.
7615632
7616119
She's starting to get to the point where she won't be able to fly any distance at all with all her gear. She's already hitting close to 20% of her body weight in flight gear (counting a full camelback in that total).
7616134
Maybe that's where the extra one in the last chapter came from.
7616187
Or, midway across she'll realize how boring it is to have nothing but water as far as the eye can see.
If she flies on a clear but slightly hazy day, it's possible she'll be out of sight of land for a few hours.
7616864
Yeah, that's my thought.
I think that from what we've seen on the show, they can magically lighten things that they're carrying (like wagons full of frogs), and they can probably hit the ground with less than the expected impact if they go out of control, but I think that they can also fatally crash. I think that RD wouldn't have tried to catch the Wonderbolts in the Rainboom episode if they would just bounce harmlessly on the ground after their fall.
7616875
That could work, actually. So maybe if they're conscious and see the ground coming, they can do that, but if they're unconscious, or don't see it coming, it doesn't help them. Or they could be too exhausted to do it, as well, just like Twilight's gotten exhausted after using a lot of magic.
7616880
I think that Pinkie might have some unicorn in her blood, so maybe she can do some spells, like teleportation. Kinda like how Daisy can do TK.
vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/3/31/Daisy_doing_magic_S1E08.png
7617285
I keep getting IFR and VFR mixed up, because I learned many, many years ago that IFR stood for "I follow river." But in Silver's case, highways are easy to follow, and it's easy to see on a map where they go. Heck, even birds know that.
Water towers are really useful too, especially since a lot of them have the town name painted right on the side, in really big letters.
Can you imagine being Fluttershy's mane stylist?
vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/9/99/Fluttershy_with_birds_S01E03.png
7497944
I don't think that any of my college professors graded on a curve, but I can't be sure of that. I know that in some classes I was in, participation was as big a part of your grade as anything else, so I passed Latin despite failing all of my tests. And by failing I mean bombing completely; my best score on a test was 55%.
I seem to recall getting test results pretty quickly, although I will admit is has been 20 years, and there were fairly few classes where test results mattered in my final grade. I think most of the professors would have given a little bump to any student who was on the border of passing or failing.
It is worth mentioning again how small a school Kalamazoo College is. At the time I attended, 900 students on campus was probably the average, and in the higher-level classes, class sizes of fewer than ten were not uncommon. My Latin class had six, my theatre senior seminar had five, my English senior seminar had eleven, and so on.
I think it was before, but again I can't be sure. While I wasn't the best student, I was at least wise enough to have all my graduation requirements done before my senior spring, which meant that I literally could have dropped or failed all of my last set of classes and still would have graduated.
Not much, to be honest. Aside from her occasional mentions of Miss Chestnut, she hasn't said anything about pony university. But then in her journal, she doesn't tend to talk all that much about her life back in Equestria, anyways. I kind of figured that she wouldn't consider that worth much mention in her journal, although if I had to do it all over again, I might make a different decision.
Yeah, Chonamare is your basic fishing village, mostly rocks and small buildings built out of rocks. She would have had to go somewhere else to get a college education.
Thinking about it, it's my Head Canon that one of the things that Pegasi learn in Flight Camp is "how to make a small cloud to rest on". You see Dash using them all the time on the show.
8781704
They do, and they probably all know how to do it. Silver Glow's got the goal in mind of making it across in one shot, though, and it would take her energy to make that cloud. More energy on Earth than it would in Equestria, too.
8784289
Not even just to rest on.
Making a cloud is a multipurpose skill- it's a useful biouvac (just nap on it), it's a place to stop and examine landmarks to regain lost bearings, or if you're truly lost another pony will go "what the fuck is this cloud" and you're found if you're near a settled/managed zone.
9254387
I feel like that’s one of those things where basically every pegasus would know how to do it. Most of them are going to be weatherponies or auxiliaries, and I’d think that in general a weather cloud and a resting cloud would be similar enough for all intents in purposes. Even if a pegasus never really got into weather or went to flight camp, odds are that if his or her parents were pegasi, that would be a skill they’d teach. I’d imagine that the only exceptions to that would be a pegasus raised by non-pegasus parents (let’s imagine that Scootaloo’s actual parents are earth ponies. for example), or a very rare case where clouds weren’t generally available. Maybe the pony equivalent of the Atacama Desert, for example.