Day 4: St Augustine - New Orleans

BOTH up bright and early for the first leg of our New Orleans journey, a two hour trip to Bonifay Florida. Picked up our transport for the trip, N8071x, a dodgy enough looking thing(both mothers that's a joke, it's perfect) Sharon's up first on the flying with me on the radios, the flying is fine and after about 20 mins of spluttering I get the hang of the radios.

AAAAAAGH there's flies out there..

Bonifay is a small airport on the Florida-Alabama border, the airport directory has an advisory to watch out for alligators and deer on the runway, the airport manager(about 6'3 and looked like Santa Claus with freckles) met us carrying a handgun (used for shooting rattlesnakes and coyote while he cuts the grass) but Sharon's biggest worry was flies, ugly flying ant type things but harmless all the same.

The second leg to New Orleans was the more scenic route, flying along the Mississippi/Alabama Gulf of Mexico coast line the scenery was amazing but its also an area of intensive military training so we had to keep our eyes open as F16's and Blackhawks zoomed by. I've no doubt we could have taken them in our PA-28 but we had bigger problems, clouds were building and thunderstorms were forecast for New Orleans. Zipping along just below the clouds we made it into Lakefront Airport in New Orleans with minutes to spare, the heavens opened as we taxied and it felt good walking into the pilots lounge seeing everyone delayed after us arriving in our rust bucket(again a joke mothers)

First impressions of New Orleans it looks like Katrina happened only a few months ago with houses boarded up and abandoned, however the tourist area, the French Quarter where we are staying looks perfect and I'll leave it to Sharon to fill you in on that tomorrow