A Pleasant Flight To Mt. Pleasant

The weather was favorable for a flight today, so I did a weather brief, headed to the airport and got the plane ready to go.

Had a nice chat with another pilot who was upgrading the avionics on his Cirrus SR-20 and he let me poke around it a bit.  Very nice plane indeed.

Poking around done I did my walk-around and got the trust Piper Archer ready to go.

Winds were out of the east, so I took off from Runway 9L and headed northwest to Mt. Pleasant.

Picked up flight following along the way, and Great Lakes Approach was nice and helpful as usual. Flew at 6,500 feet and it was pretty smooth flying.

On the way to Mt. Pleasant, I overflew the Flint Airport:

Then on to Mt. Pleasant, and a very nice landing on Runway 9, after doing a practice RNAV approach.

There's a VOR located on the field:

 Interestingly enough, even with a VOR right on the field, KMOP only has RNAV GPS approaches and no VOR approaches anymore.

Parked the plane, and then I took a complimentary shuttle to the Soaring Eagle Casino.

I played some craps, had some good rolls, and a lot of fun.  I was up, then down, then up, and finally down enough to lose $100 and then I called it quits. Would have been nice to walk away with some winnings, but it was worth the 3 hours of entertainment.   Fun watching people play with serious money - some were making single roll bets with $500 in chips - losing, and sometimes winning big.

I then caught the shuttle back to the airport.

Winds had picked up quite a bit but were still pretty much down the runway. After takeoff I picked up flight following again.

Clouds had also dropped a bit, so at times I couldn't stay clear of them at 5,500 and had to play dodge cloud as I was VFR.

Still, it was pretty smooth with only a little light chop, and the return flight was a bit quicker. Clouds got higher south of Flint and I could travel unimpeded at 5,500 again.

Got handed off to Detroit Approach and the controller actually seemed surprised that I not only checked in properly ,but had also already picked up the ATIS for Pontiac. He gave me a VFR descent at my discretion when I was 12 miles out from Pontiac so I started a gentle descent from 5,500.

Then got passed on to Pontiac Tower and got sequenced for a 5 mile final approach. Another excellent landing and that was the trip.

Then to clean off the lots and lots of bugs smashed by the plane, For some reason there were a lot of them out there today, so it took longer than usual to get the plane all nice and clean.

I certainly haven't been flying nearly enough, so we'll try and fix that. 

That's a total of 2.4, and 2 rather nice landings.