Oshkosh, Day One

We drove up yesterday, and suffered a major thunderstorm with pea-sized hail once we got here. I was concerned that such weather may become the hallmark of Oshkosh 2006, but today refuted that notion convincingly. It was maybe 85 degrees, sunny, and we enjoyed a great breeze (which likely wasn't quite so great for those who chose to fly up, but I choose to be selfish on this one) today - perfect weather for a fly-in. So perfect, in fact, that I shot 508 pictures! I won't be able to upload them until later - the camera battery is dead. That could have been frustrating, but it died as I took the final picture that would fit on my memory card. That in itself wasn't terrific since there were still picture-worthy events subsequent to the untimely loss of photographic capability, but at least card capacity and battery capacity get to share the blame.

That said, I can share the news about my biggest ever Oshkosh purchase now and get the pictures up later. I've been longing for in-plane weather ever since I heard about the Garmin 396, which downloads weather from the XM radio satellites and displays it on the GPS moving map, but at $2495 I was very reluctant to buy it. Between the price and the probably irrational, yet very persistent, animosity I still feel towards their tech support over wanting to charge me $250 to tell me the equivalent of the Microsoft three finger salute in order to fix a system crash (that their software was responsible for in the first place!), I was hoping for an alternative to holding my nose and throwing what to me was an enormous amount of disposable income to Garmin. I found what I was looking for with the Anywhere Wx, which was not only $1000 lower cost, but has a nice collection of benefits over the Garmin solution, at least with regards to my personal situation. And buying it here saved me almost $300 over what it would have cost had I ordered it over the internet! I'll talk more about it when I get back and install it in the plane and see how it works in flight.

It was a long, hot day, and I want to get the pictures off of the memory card and onto the laptop so I can clear the card for tomorrow. Hopefully I can get a few pix up soon.