April 4, 2018
My wife, Amy, is currently on a cross-country bike ride. It’s coast-to-coast… she started in San Diego, CA on March 3, 2018 and will end in St. Augustine, FL on April 23, 2018. That’s quite a trip! And, no, I didn’t go with her. Cycling is her passion, mine is aviation (ok, you probably guessed the latter).
Her group is on the “southern route” which takes them through Texas. (Specifically, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida.) When she reached the halfway point — near Kerrville, Texas on March 29 — she was within flying distance, so I got it in my mind that I’d go fly over her route, see if I could find her and take some photos of her from the air. Unfortunately, the weather (and other obligations) didn’t cooperate until today (April 4).
While it was clear blue skies today, the wind was pretty blustery. I’ve had good luck so far with flying the Cavalon in gusty winds so I figured this won’t be too bad. I was partially right.
I started fairly early, in the air before 9:30am, and had about 80 miles 
to go to be in her area, near Shepherd, Texas. As usual, I look for anything interesting to take photos of, so…. the first, very noticeable element to the land below me was, it was flooded! At this area, the Trinity River was definitely causing some flooding havoc.
Despite the flooding, there was this very pretty field, with yellow blossoms throughout… where it wasn’t flooded, that is.
And though this house in the middle of a flooded field looks sad, looking at it closer I realized that it seemed to be just slightly above the flood waters, thanks to a pier-and-beam foundation that lifts it off the ground a couple of feet. So, hopefully they didn’t get much damage. But it’s probably a challenge to go to the grocery store.
About halfway to my destination area is the Cleveland, Texas airport (6R3), and I got this nice shot of it:
Another 20 minutes and I’m now close to Coldspring, Texas, which is at the east end of a road segment I knew they would be on.
Using a smartphone app called ‘Glympse’, I could see where she was, but the information is usually about 10 seconds old. But still that’s not bad so I could get a good idea if I was above her. Like a good part of her trek, she rides with another woman, Linda, so I just looked for two cyclists close together. It turned out to be a good thing they were together because, real time, while flying, I was having a hard time making out Amy’s orange helmet. In the end, though, I got several good shots of her and Linda, as well as a few shots of some of her other trek members.
Yes, I could have flown a lot lower and gotten better pictures (probably), but it would not have been safe. The gusts were frequent and while not unpleasant, it was still a handful. Trying to take pictures at the same time as handling the Cavalon, well, that wasn’t too bad, but it was hard to also keep her in view. So, between all the task loading, I felt a lot more safe by maintaining a higher altitude.
My track for that period of time I’m trying to get pictures is interesting:
The overlapping yellow circular area is where I was trying to keep away from a cell tower. While I did that, I took a short GoPro video:
At that point, there wasn’t anything to do but head back to the airport. But I was near Double Lake, a state park that I frequented during my teenage years, so I figured I’d fly over and take a few shots.
Here’s a shot of Highway 59 — locally, we call it the Eastex Freeway — looking southwest toward Houston:
As I get closer to the airport, I see the flooding once more:
In summary, it was kind of a hike to get to where she was cycling, but I enjoyed doing it and I know she appreciated the effort. Though it was a very breezy day, the Cavalon redeemed itself quite nicely… I simply had to slow things down a bit to make it comfortable. Overall gas consumption for this trip was an amazing 3.8 gph! Time in the air, about 2 hours 50 minutes, with 161 miles covered.
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That Cavalon seems like a good amount of fun