When Hell Freezes Over, or maybe just to Vermont and back...

This is what Southern Vermont/Albany NY area looked like today. Compared to the greater Philly area, Winters are serious up there I can tell! After the snowiest December on record, so they said, there was still a bunch of it on the ground and the areas where it melted the frozen ground seemed to keep it from weeping into the ground and instead areas were flooded. Looked like pictures of Holland or something like that. We new we Philly boys were cold weather light-weights when one or two of the locals were walking around the airport in T-shirts while I was digging for my top jacket as soon as I crawled out of my plane! Dale, Doug, Rob and I flew up there to pick up Dale and Rob's RV-7A from J&M Aviation. The 2 week paint job quote turned into an 8 week 'ordeal' for robdale. They missed some fantastic Thanksgiving through Christmas flying weather so they were bummin'. They also had some expectation/price squabble issues. They were quoted 4500 plus a couple hundred extra for the pearl paint they decided later they wanted. The bill they got today was $6900. Quite a shock. After negotiations I think the out the door final bill was $6100. That's around the quote I was 'tentatively' given but still no final word for me since he wanted to think about it some more. Sigh. Well robdale's painted plane did look nice. Rob did the test flight and complained of some bad elevator and aileron shock in slow flight/flare attitude. Turned out they didn't install the wing root fairing/rubber seal and the turbulence through there was a real eye-opener for Rob. Once we all finally got ready to leave, Rob had to turnaround and land do to fuel pouring out of a wing tank cap that just wasn't sealing right. Exciting day all around. Don't worry, everyone eventually got their planes home and I don't think Rob even chipped any of the paint yet on the new RV. There's always tomorrow...but it is obvious that there's habits that develop that will have to change to protect the finish. I can't show you the scenery where we were flying a couple hundred feet between mountain tops and cloud bottoms. A plane like and RV gives one a false sense of near invulnerability and makes one too brave at times I think. What looked like was going to be just a few minute of fun flying turned into more of an adventure than we wanted and the clouds kept getting lower or each new wave of mountains larger. Anyway, the turbulence of the wind over the mountain tops made it all but impossible at times to even tune a radio. The blurry pictures below are from today and what it felt like sometimes. Anyway, we took the long way back around the mountains and the total flight time was exactly the same according to my GPS. Fun, really. We're sickos but our wives still love us. Usually.