craziest month of my life: part 1 - vacation

As promised, this is going to be the first in a series of entries regarding my crazy month of July. I’m going to combine some events in order to consolidate the blogs but I still have a feeling they’re going to be a bit verbose.

First off, let me tell you about my vacation. Justin (former college room mate/future post-college room mate) and I decided to take a trip down to West Palm Beach Florida for a few days. The trip was dual-purpose: the first day was business and the remainder was therapy. We had both been researching helicopter schools and stumbled across a local community college in West Palm Beach that had teamed up with a few local area flight schools to offer a degree along with a license. I won’t bore you with the details of why this is such an ideal arrangement right now but let’s just say it made it appealing enough for us to want to fly down and check it all out in person. So that’s what we did.

We coordinated our travel plans so that we were both arriving around the same time to the Palm Beach Airport. Of course all of our well-laid plans went right down the pooper when Justin’s flight got cancelled and I had to wait at the airport for 5 hours because the stinkin rental car companies wanted to charge me an extra $25 bucks a day to rent the car in my name because for another 5 days I was technically still only 24 so I waited and waited and waited... (I’d like to take this opportunity to thank PBI for having free wireless internet and thank NBC for putting full episodes of their shows on their website. Ya’ll are life savers!)

The first day of the trip was reserved for checking out the flight school, the college, and the West Palm Beach area. First on the itinerary was visiting the flight school. I guess I was a little excited about it because we actually showed up for our appointment an hour early. The receptionist actually asked us to leave and come back in an hour so we went to a little local diner (Jo-Jo’s) and grabbed some grub to kill time. A little embarrassing but I’d rather be an hour early than an hour late, right?

We finished breakfast then came back for our tour, this time a little closer to our scheduled time. The facilities were rather small so the tour itself didn’t take very long but that was fine with me because the main thing I was interested in was taking place after the tour: my demo flight. I’ve never actually flown in a helicopter before so I figured if I’m going to make this my future career, perhaps I should actually try it first. At the conclusion of the tour my pilot Matt gave me my headset and we headed out to the helipad. Justin took care of the documentation of this epic event while Matt talked me through the pre-flight checklist and tested all the control surfaces. Once everything checked out it was time to take to the skies!

I was unbelievably excited. I sat in the pilot seat while Matt sat in the training seat next to me, obviously with his own matching set of controls. He fired up the engine and we waited for an eternity (or so it seemed to me) for the little light to go off indicating the rotor was at full speed. When it was, Matt ever so gently began to pull up on the collective (the stick that makes the helicopter go up) making our little craft shake as it “got light on the skids”. The downdraft from the spinning blades blasted into the tiny door-less cabin temporarily alleviating the stifling heat and humidity. As Matt continued to pull up on the stick the helicopter began to rise further and further off the ground. Although I couldn’t see it, I could tell that there was a direct relationship between the distance we were from the ground and the size of my smile: the higher we got, the bigger my smile got. We hover-taxied only a few feet off the ground across the runway as my smile continued to grow. Once we were in position Matt pulled hard on the stick and we finally began to climb high and fast into the sky. By this time my smile had reached capacity so my overwhelming excitement needed another outlet: I actually began to laugh. Now that I think back Matt was probably wondering, “What the heck is so funny? This kid is loony.” True as that may be, I was overcome with excitement. This is the type of telltale reaction I was hoping for. That moment was crucial for me, for if I’m going to invest years of training into this (not to mention the substantial financial investment) then I wanted to make sure I was going to enjoy it. “Enjoy”…that isn’t even close to describing how I felt about it. I was ecstatic!

As we flew above housetops and along the beach I asked myself the question I had determined to ask while I was up there: “Can I see myself doing this every single day for the rest of my life?” The answer was an emphatic “Yes!” I loved every single bit of it and was trying desperately to soak in every last detail. After a few minutes Matt asked me if I was ready to take my turn at the controls. Are you kidding me?! Of course I am! He let me try the different control functions individually will he took care of the other 2 so he always had the majority control while still letting me experience an aspect of the flight. It was definitely challenging. We came down low again to try hovering and I definitely had a rough time with that. Matt assured me that it was the most difficult part and that they made it look easy. He said it would get easier over time but for my fist flight I did a good job. Hey, I’ll take that. I’m just glad I didn’t crash the darn thing!

From the flight school, Justin and I moved on to the college. There we met with the lady in charge of the pilot program and discussed the details of the program with her. We stayed for about an hour and got quite a bit of useful info. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all good news. The cost of the program is insanely high especially for out of state residents and we found we’d have to live there for about a year to establish residency. Also, due to restrictions set by the school it wasn’t exactly possible to finance the whole thing so a lot of the money would have to come from somewhere other than loans. That was a bit of a bummer to Justin and I but we figured we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

Once the work was over the rest of the trip was nothing but fun. We saw movies, checked out the Palm Beach nightlife, went kayaking, rented jet skis, and had a ton of fun just driving around and farting away the remaining 4 days. It was the vacation I had needed for quite some time and I’m so glad Justin was the one to go with me. At the end of the trip when it was time to come home, my batteries were recharged and I was prepared to sit down and ponder all of the information I’d gathered and what the next step would be towards my career. I was fully prepared to return to work and fall right back into my humdrum schedule. Little did I know, the excitement was FAR from over!