For now.

So Tim and I decided to leave the plane here to get the maintenance it needs, while we head back to California this afternoon.  I can't say that there's not a little bit of disappointment that we won't be able to fly ourselves home and arrive in style.  While both of us know that we really couldn't have wished things to turn out any better, I can't help but feel a like a kid who dropped my ice cream cone.  "But I really waanted to fly back home through South Dakota and over the Rockies!"

For a while we tried to convince ourselves that it would make good sense to find a way to come back and finish the trip we started.  If nothing else, we've had a heckuva time sharing our adventures so far on this blog and with everyone commenting.  It's definitely anti-climatic to end it by boarding a commercial flight.  But ultimately our adult selves won out, and we realized that as much as we wanted to, we just couldn't justify the time and costs to come back here ourselves.   So we'll head back home, and Tim's coordinating with a flight instructor to fly our plane back sometime in the next week or two.

In the meantime, we'll continue our adventures (on the ground and in the air) back in California.  I'll see if I can do better about posting them here.  We've got a list of places we want to go that grows longer every time we think about it.

So....  That's all folks.  For now.

We'll be back!