Jesse's Birthday - Sept 30, 2010

Carolina had quite the surprise in store for my birthday. We got up Saturday morning, drove about an hour out of the city and stopped at a small air strip in Parakai. Carolina booked me in for flying lessons! We met the instructor and he gave us a pretty detailed explanation of everything we would be doing.

The plane was a Tecnam P92 - a really small 2-person plane. The instructor did the take-off and landing, but I had control while we were up in the air. There's a stick/pedals on both sides, so either of us could control it at anytime. Once we were in the air he just took his hands off and I was in control! It was really exciting! There's a lot going on when you're in the air. The stick controls the flaps on the wings, then you have foot pedals for the rear rudder. When you move the stick, you'll change direction, but the rear of the plane won't follow the front of the plane, so you start to fly at a weird somewhat-sideways angle. To fix that you need to use the foot pedals to straighten the rear out so you fly straight and have less wind-drag. You also need to keep an eye on all the different instruments like your altitude, flying angle, etc. Once we were up in the air we were going about 200km/h. I did a few turns and we took it down along the coastline. I was really surprised how much distance we covered. Even in those little planes you could make it all the way down to Wellington in a couple hours.


The engine inspection: "Yup, that looks good to me too"




Here's a description of the plane if you're interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecnam_P92

They gave me a discount coupon if I want to continue lessons and get my license. It was really fun, but I don't have the time or money to add flying to the schedule, haha.

After that we stopped at a waterpark. They have a couple waterslides and a few pools, but it was a bit cold and windy out. We walked around the park and decided it was too cold, so we moved on to the next thing she had planned. We made our way along the beautiful terrain and spotted "Sheep World", haha. We had to make a pitstop!




Yup, pink sheep!


We missed the daily sheep-dog show and the sheep shearing lesson, but we got a few pictures anyways. We grabbed some lunch at a nice cafe in tiny little town and kept driving north of Auckland.






We spent the rest of the afternoon in Leigh at the Goat Island Marine Reserve. It was really beautiful. The area is famous for having massive swarms of fish. You can go on Glass-bottom boat rides and scuba diving is very popular. We were happy to just relax on the beach.











Some birds Jesse figured he could sneak up on: