Day 21: Lakeland, FL

Day 21: June 20th, Lakeland, FL. This will be a short blog entry, since I did very little on this day. My intention was to fly to Key West, spend a night, and then connect with my friend in Miami on the 21st, since he would be arriving back from Santiago, Chile on that day. Unfortunately, my health made other plans for me.

On the way home from Disney, my dry cough flared up again, and it seemed like I was having this problem each night, starting around 9pm. I would cough so much, I had trouble getting a sentence out. Walking around Disney all day in the heat was starting to take its toll. When I woke up on the 20th, I felt awful. To top things off, the conjunctivitis that had improved earlier returned in my left eye. This had gone on too long; it was time for a doctor. I connected with my local doctor in Albany and he was able to prescribe antibiotics, eyedrops, and an inhaler for the dry cough. For most of the day, I tried to recuperate while George and Abigail went to the Bartow airport to work on their airplane and show it to a perspective buyer. Finally, I headed to the pharmacy to pick up the prescriptions and to get a haircut.

I started in on the meds, and began feeling better. Any residual of the sore throat I had was eliminated immediately, which was a good sign. It seemed like the antibiotics were working, so hopefully, this would lead me down the path towards recovery. I first got this dry cough on Nantucket, and that was 18 days prior! A trip like this can take its toll, but I had to make my health the number one priority.

During the day, I received a twitter message from the local Lakeland newspaper, The Ledger. Somehow, they had tapped into my twitter feed and thought my flight would make a good story. I spoke with the reporter at length, describing the trip, explaining why I was undertaking such a journey and what kind of planning goes into a trip like this. The article was published in The Ledger on the next day. See http://is.gd/19bos .. Lakeland is a very religious town which a church at every corner, so I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised when the comments about the article on the newspaper's website took on religious overtones.

We ordered pizza for dinner and I planned my flight to Miami for the next day. One thing that George convinced me to use for flight planning was the website http://fltplan.com/ I had an account at the site already, but had not really used it because I thought it was overly complicated. It is very comprehensive, but it covers just about everything in terms of planning an IFR flight. In the past, I would have to reference several sites to plan my flight. First, I would use http://flightaware.com/ to see what preferred routings ATC was giving pilots between my origin and destination. Next, I used http://duats.com/ to estimate time enroute using the winds aloft forecast. After that, I would map the route using http://skyvector.com/. And, finally, I would come back to http://duats.com/ and file an IFR flight plan. Fltplan.com does all of that for me. It is also very easily accessible from my cell phone, so filing and changing flight plans is a snap when I'm away from a computer. This really comes in handy later when I'm in Austin.