Two Days of Stirring Air

You've seen a machine similar to the one we flew home in the video I posted and thought was a fake.

The Robinson R44 Raven II we flew home had this same paint scheme.

I just got home from work this morning and I have a bit of a sore throat.


I'm gonna give ya some coordinates to get us started on our journey, and I'll post again later, if you don't mind.


We took off from Torrance, CA., West of Long Beach, and flew Eastbound, just North of the Long Beach airport.
There is now a permanent flight restriction over Disneyland, just south of Fullerton, so I contacted Fullerton Tower and asked to pass just North of them to avoid drawing the attention of the Federalis.

We then followed Highway 91 Eastbound past Corona and Riverside, and called March AFB approach to pass just North of them. Just East of March Air Base we join Interstate 10, and will follow it all the way to El Paso.

East of the Pass at Banning, CA., we contact Palm Springs approach control. Palm Springs always has trouble picking us up on radar because we are too low......behind the mountain from him. But around Palm Springs at coordinates: 33 54 50.69N 116 42 37.99W there are windmills just about everywhere. It's difficult to see them in the satellite image, but you can see the service roads, and that'll give you an idea how many of them are there. The wind flows through the pass one way in the morning, and then the opposite way in the evening. The windmills are always spinning!

Clearing Palm Springs, we can look forward to about an hour's flight to Blythe. I have a friend at Blythe that asked if I had ever seen the "Blythe Intaglios".
I hadn't.
He gave me directions to find them, and I have twice been in the area he directed me to without seeing them.
Turns out, they are much smaller than I expected. The artwork done in the Andes during this same time frame is huge.........the size of a small town. If you are looking for something that large, it's easy to overlook something about the size of a tennis court.
The Intaglios are at 33 48 02.16N 114 31 55.67 W. That coordinate will take you to the two legged figure. If you look just Southeast of this figure, you'll see another artwork....this one with four legs.
Blythe was a large training area during World War II. The airport was a B-17 base.....there is a commemorative marker at the entrance to the terminal.

General Patton also used the area to train his tank Corps. My friend in Blythe told me the tanks ran over and ruined many of the Intaglios before they realized they were treading over ancient, irreplaceable works of art. How sad.

Look closely at the image, and you can see where someone drove over the two-legged figure.
These images are now surrounded by a protective fence.

These two figures are on sloping ground overlooking the Colorado river. As we fly over the river I comment that it's odd to realize we are looking at water that has been through the Grand Canyon.

Blythe uses the river for irrigating many crops: Hay, Lemons, Oranges, Cotton.
It is an oasis in the middle of rocks and small bushes.

Gonna hit the hay now. I'll be back later with some more sights to see, via Google Earth.