Tornado Warning!

Today has been . . . interesting. The morning started off with a mandatory briefing. The briefing covered general aspects of the race with more in-depth details of fly-bys and rules to follow tomorrow. Some team's race numbers did not comply with the rules, and they were called out in the meeting. The fur was flying because they couldn't get back to their planes to fix the numbers due to impounding rules and they were going to be assessed a timing penalty. They were not happy campers. Jann and I were in the clear, so we just watched it all go down.

After the morning meeting, we were free until 6:00PM. Jann and I decided to drive down to a state park and hike around a bit. In the middle of the afternoon. In Florida. It was very, very hot. We made it back to the car, and decided to go see something that was maybe indoors. I booted up the GPS and looked for local destinations. We decided that we would like to visit the Shell Factory in North Fort Myers. Enroute, we stopped at an aquarium store to check out the fish. Nothing too exciting there. We continued on to the Shell Factory and ran into an afternoon Florida storm. We thought it was just a weak, pop-up deal . . . until it started to hail. And lightning. And rain. Hard. We had to pull over because we couldn't see, and parked under this little car port. It turned out that we were in the parking lot for the Shell Factory, so we waited for it to stop raining so hard and went inside.

The Shell Factory was pretty underwhelming, and we were just about to leave when the manager came over the PA system and asked everyone to move into the hallway because there was a tornado moving inland. I looked around and decided that I didn't want to be in a store full of heavy rocks, pointy shells, and glass in a torndao and called up Justin to pull down the weather for me. The conversation went something like this:

J: Well, your winds are at 250 . . .
M: No, no, I need more like . . . tornado information.
J: . . . Okay. It's storming.

He was a good sport and gave me the echo tops and some other information. Jann and I decided to leave and head back to South Fort Myers. The weather was better there, so no problems.

We are going over some flight planning items tonight. We need to attend a few briefings tomorrow, including the one dealing with fly-bys. We will receive a waiver from the FAA to let us fly fast and low. I am excited; the FAA is giving me permission to do something stupid!

We're not sure yet if we're going to file IFR, go VFR direct, or go VFR up the coast outbound to Waycross. Everyone (~54 planes) will all be departing Fort Myers within a few minutes of each other, and we're not sure if we want to be caught up in that. We may go VFR up the coast to avoid the traffic and for some sightseeing.

Look for pictures; I'll do that tonight sometime. Still haven't figured out an easy way to put captions.

*EDIT* As you can (hopefully) see, I have a new and improved slideshow for you! With captions! Enjoy!