PBY.......

8:13 am - Monday - August 17th - Coupeville, WA - 61° F, 81% humidity, wind 7 mph out of the southwest......clear, blue skies today with a forecast high of 71° F.....the view this morning.......↴

....on this day in 2014 I was riding my Intense 5.5 MTB at Mammoth Mountain Bike Park....I had a funny crash (not really hurt).......↴

I haven't had my trailer set up for full use since May when we were still in Wittmann, AZ, and since we are going to be here two weeks I decided to pull everything out, including my Cannondale Bad Boy, which I have not ridden since I got my eBike........

....I still need to deploy my Black & Decker Workmate, and bench grinder, but I'm getting there!  While I was toiling in the trailer TLE was defrosting our Dometic Classic refrigerator.  Back in May when we were at Goosenecks State Park she had me recoat one of the wire shelving units with Plasti-Dip (I wrote about that here).  It worked so well I bought 4 more cans from Amazon and had them delivered to our friends' home in Meeker, CO (John and Lisa) expecting to do the rest of them, but other things intervened, and I never got to it.  Well, no time like the present, so I asked her for the worst one, which wasn't nearly as bad as the first one, and I got to work spraying a new coat of white rubber on the rack......

.....it only seems to take about a third of a bottle to do one rack, so I may have way more Plasti-Dip than I will need the rest of my life......lol.......

......by the time I finished it the flying conditions were still perfect so I relaunched our Holy Stone drone to get more pictures and video......I managed to get the drone up to just under 100' and got some pretty spectacular pictures.......

 
....we needed to run a few errands in Oak Harbor so after putting away the drone we headed out in the VW.  We visited Walmart for a few things, then Ace Hardware where we picked up a few wasp traps to deploy around the area where the Newell is parked.  As we were walking out of the hardware store I suddenly realized there was a PBY parked in the lot across the street.  This is a World War II flying boat used extensively in the South Pacific, and was the most widely used seaplane in World War II.  The first two letters stand for Patrol Bomber, and the 'Y' was the letter designation assigned to Consolidated Aircraft, its manufacturer. Why is this a big thing for me?  Well, my father was a Machinist Mate, 2nd Class in the Navy, and he was trained specifically to work on PBY's.  He was stationed in the South Pacific at a rear base helping keep these planes flying.  The last time I saw one of these in the flesh was when I was 10 years old......

 The 'PBY'

.....to make it even better there is a 'PBY' museum across the street.....none of this was here the last time we were in Oak Harbor pre 2014

.....these planes were slow, but had an effective flying range of over 5,000  without refueling....

TLE snapped this picture of me in front of the plane

....we went in the museum and talked with Wil, one of the docents, and he advised me if I came back on Wednesday they would take me inside the fenced area to get a closer look at the plane.

From there we hit up Autozone for some coolant for the Beetle....yup, VW's require special coolant.  Finally we did some grocery shopping at Haggan's (owned by Safeway, but a little higher end).  We didn't arrive back home until after 2:30 pm.  After putting away our purchases I retired to the 'Lido Deck' to read, and enjoy the ever amazing view.  Around 5 pm Bob came up from the main house to watch me fly the drone one more time......

 Bob and I (Karen is seated next to the Newell)

 ...ultimately TLE came out with Karen to watch the pilot in action

......at Haggan's we had purchased a beautiful Coho Salmon filet to grill for dinner.....TLE wanted to introduce our hosts to her marvelous Celantro/Lime grilled Salmon.  I grilled the filet around 6:45 pm, and then took it down to the main house where we had a wonderful, slow paced dinner and much conversation.....we bid our adieus around 9:15 pm and headed for the barn.......the tail end of a beautiful sunset was in progress.......

.....thanks for stopping by again!

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