The Trek… In 2007, after 26 years of marriage, Beth & I started an amazing and passionate journey into aviation by building and flying our own plane. Yep, building a real plane, in our garage – 18,000 rivets – hours of scuffing, de-burring, drilling, reaming, priming, rinse & repeat – parts in the attic, parts in the den and a propellor in the bedroom next to the treadmill we didn’t use any more. Most of our friends and family thought we were crazy, some thought we had completely lost it, only a few understood. It has truly been a life changing experience!

This blog and these pages will try to show to everyone how exciting, challenging and fun the process of building, flying and maintaining an airplane can be. Along the way, I hope we can share some of the knowledge we have obtained in the process and maybe convince others to follow our path.

2FlyAmerica… thats right, one of the things on our “bucket list” is to land our homebuilt airplane in every state in the USA except Hawaii, yep, even Alaska. A large part of the blog will be devoted to where we have been, where we are going and how we got there.

Lots of pictures… One of my other interests has always been photography. I have taken thousands of photos of airplanes, airshows and travel destinations over the last 20 years, most of them aren’t anything special and lot of them are on film or slides. I plan to share some of the better photos from the past while well documenting our future trips and experimenting with various forms of photography such as high dynamic range (HDR), panoramas, and black & white.

WHY… First of all, I am not a writer as you will eventually figure out. But, a conversation at a recent event made me realize that Beth and I do have a story to tell:

While hiding out in the Sunset Grill at the Sun-N-Fun airshow in March of 2012 during a rain shower, another couple was sitting across from us at the table. “So, I see the RV-9A on your hat, did you build one?” the guy asked me. Yes WE did, I replied… and about an hour later, Beth & I were out of breath explaining how much we enjoyed the building process to this guy and his wife and a few other surrounding listeners. No, we are not the first people on earth to build a plane, but, as a couple, it was an unusual success!

So, if you’re interested in what we have done or what we are doing, just enter your e-mail address in the “follow blog via e-mail” section in the upper right hand corner of the page and WordPress will magically send you updates to the blog as we post them or you can click “Follow @24golf” in the lower right hand column to follow us on Twitter.

Thanks…