Thunderstorms
I made it to Lincoln, Nebraska (KLNK) today. I’m staying with my brother tonight.
Not much to say, other than that I’m learning more about dealing with thunderstorms. There have been scattered cells all over Iowa for the past two days straight.
I thought about staying in Cedar Rapids again tonight, but decided I’d take a calculated gamble on the weather and try to move west, hoping the thunderstorms in western Iowa would die off before I’d reach them in the early evening. The gamble paid off and I made it to Lincoln under clear skies.
I took off out of Cedar Rapids at 5:00 p.m. tonight and made it to Lincoln by a hair past 8:00. That’s not bad considering I was bucking headwinds the whole way.
I burned 5.5 gallons of fuel per hour, running at 2400 rpm the whole way. That is nearly a gallon per hour more than I expected to burn. I attributed the high fuel burn earlier in the trip to being heavy and running the engine hard (2500 rpm). Now I’m not so sure. I’m hoping nothing is mechanically wrong with the carburator or mixture control. I’ll keep very close tabs on it tomorrow, plan my fuel stops conservatively, and see how it goes. Hopefully I can figure out how to bring it back to the 4 or 4.5 gph range.
Here are some pics from today:
Deviating to the south of Des Moines, Iowa around an area of heavy precip…
A shot of downtown Lincoln while entering a right base for Runway 35…
My plan for Monday is to keep moving west, following Interstate 80, and come through the Salt Lake City area. I originally planned to go further north, up through Missoula, Montana, but the weather in the Salt Lake basin looks better for the next several days than the weather in northern Idaho. Hopefully I’m making the right choice. Only time will tell…