Well, I am back home now, trying to get back into the swing of my recovery lifestyle.
I have always believed that you should have as many days after a vacation to recover as you were gone, so it will take me a bout 13 days to complete my reintegration into recovery mode. (That explains why people coming back to work after a vacation are essentially useless when they first get back to work. Their brains are still on vacation, and they need to tell everybody what fun they had!)
Revisiting Dayton
I finally figured out that it has been about 20 years since I visited Dayton. Things have changed a lot. There are roads where there were none before, new Apartments, housing developments that are gone. I would drive along a road I remembered and see landmarks I recognized mixed in with stuff I have never seen before. It was an experience.
I forgot something about Ohio. If you drive along a state road, you go through a small town every few miles. There are farms in between, so you sort of get a sense of being in the country, but then you run through a small town and things feel much different. And, it seems that every small town has an airport!
Airports
I did an airport drive around Dayton, and visited five of them in one trip! Each one I visited is one I flew into when I was learning to fly. I hardly recognized any of them. It seems that aviation is a big deal in Ohio, and these fields have grown up in the years since I lived here. That makes sense given that Ohio is the "Birthplace of Aviation". It says so on their license plates.
The Wright Brothers
I worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on Wright Field, named after guess who, for almost 11 years, and learned to fly in a club located in an old alert hanger at the end of the runway at Patterson Field. (WPAFB is actually two bases a short distance apart). At the opposite end of the runway I flew from during most of my flight training is Huffman Prairie, where the Wright Brothers did their flight testing while in Dayton. That part of the base used to be off limits to civilians, but the state has made it into the Dayton Aviation National Historical Park, and they cut that part of the base off, together with the base golf course, and opened it up for visitors. The base fence has moved as a result.
In the middle of the prairie they have reconstructed a small barn building the brothers used to store their airplane when they were working on it, or not flying. You can walk through that building and get a feel for what they experienced. I always thought it was something special to have learned to fly on the same field the Wright Brothers learned to fly on. Not many folks can say they did this! I did, and I feel a kinship with them as a result. Flying is a wonderful experience, far different from driving a car. Anyone can learn to do it, but not many do.
The Wright Brothers Bicycle Shop used to be in Dayton, but it was moved to Dearborn. Michigan in Greenfield Village with a bunch of buildings used by Edison. Dayton still has an original building where the company operated in the late 1800's, and they build a replica of the building used to do most of the airplane development. This building used to be in a park near downtown, but I got a feeling it has moved. I did not try to find it. There is a replica of one of their later designs living in a museum now located at a field south of town where I took my pilot's license test (actually two of them, I have a Private Pilot's license and a Commercial Pilot's license as well!) I visited that field, but the museum was closed.
Visiting AFIT
My last job at WPAFB was teaching in the Air force's Graduate School, the Air Force Institute of Technology. I was on the faculty there for almost six years, teaching graduate computer science. When I was there, there were two buildings separated by a street, but they have build a ton of new buildings and merged everything into one huge campus with all the buildings connected. In the winter, that makes getting from place to place much nicer.
I was interested in finding out if any of my old friends were still teaching there. As it turns out, only one person seemed to still be there (after 30 years). Gary Lamont, a professor in the Electrical Engineering Department, is still there. (It seems teaching is something you can do until you are not around anymore!) The only problem I had was he was nowhere to be found. (This is a running joke at AFIT. I used to tell folks I was going to have my students build a "faculty locator system" with screens around the building showing where the faculty was hiding!) All I could do was leave Gary a note on his office door, saying hello.
Gary and I used to travel around the country teaching courses for Advanced micro Devices. Gary taught hardware design using AMD devices, and I taught them how to program the systems. We did this while on vacation from our jobs, so we did not do this as official Air Force business. Still, I earned enough money teaching these courses to finance building my first home computers, back when the very idea of owning your own personal computer was very new. It was a lot of fun.
On one of these trips, we taught the course at Cape Kennedy, to the Shuttle Launch Team, as the very first Shuttle was being prepared for launch. They took us right to the base of the launch tower, almost close enough to touch the fuel tanks. I wish I had pictures from back then, but none remain.
Done with Dayton
After driving around for a few days, I finally reached the point where I was done with all this exploring. I enjoyed seeing the changes, but I finally decided this was not my town anymore. So, it was time to go home!
Back to Austin
On Tuesday, I flew from Dayton to Dallas, then to Austin and back to my patient wife, Cheryl, who put up with my private vacation. On the trip back, I used my iPad and a pilot's GPS device I bought at Sporty's Pilot Shop in Cincinnati to figure out where we were as the flight progressed. It seems that the airlines have decided that you can use smart phones and tablets the entire time you are on the plane. Laptops still must be off until you get up to cruising altitude.
My GPS iPad was loaded with a US map, and I had tried it out while driving in the rental car on this trip. I was interested to see if it would work in the airplane on this trip. I had a window seat on both legs, so I fired up the "app" with the GPS plugged in and waited to see if it could see enough satellites to work. Wonder of Wonders, it latched on while we were sitting at the terminal and the map zoomed in showing where we were at the airport. Great!
As we taxied out to the runway, a speedometer showed that we were moving at around 20 miles-per-hour, and the map updated showing up moving toward the runway. This is just what it is supposed to do!. Then the fun part happened.
As the plane started down the runway, the speedometer started climbing. Soon we were going 160 miles per hour, and the plane lifted off of the ground and we were airborne. I always wondered how fast these things were going when they took off, now I know. We kept speeding up until we reached about 200 MPH and climbed up into the sky. The GPS showed our altitude, measured from "sea level", which is the earth at the ocean level. Dayton is about 500 feet above sea level, and we were climbing up toward our cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. As we got higher, the airplane leveled off a bit and the speed climbed to around 300 MPH. When we reached our final altitude, it accelerated to around 550 MPH. Hey, that is moving right along. My flying experience is limited to airplanes that never got faster than about 150 MPH! (I can hardly wait for my F4 ride. We will reach almost the speed of sound, around 800 MPH).
I watched the app as we flew along, and was able to spot the towns we flew over. From Dayton, we flew south over Cincinnati, then over Louisville, Kentucky. We flew over a small chunk of Missouri, then into Arkansas. I took a nap, all of this excitement is tiring, and woke up as we approached Dallas.
The descent into Dallas was at around 250 MPH (you do not want to go too fast when near an airport). The landing was at 160 MPH, and it was fun seeing how well the brakes on the ship got us down to around 30 MPH when we turned off the runway. Cool
Of course, the next flight was from a gate about 50 miles from where we stopped. (Actually, it was only 20 gates away, it just seemed like 50 miles). I walked to the next gate only to find a bunch of people getting ready to board. Fortunately, I checked the flight board and found out the plane was late, and going to Cancun. Maybe I should have tried to get on that one and started another vacation!
The last leg of the flight was short enough that the plane never went higher than 25,000 feet, and stayed below 400 MPH. We landed nicely in Austin in 30 minutes of flying.
Unfortunately, I was sitting in the next to last row of the plane, so it took FOREVER for those folks to get moving so I could get off the plane. When I finally go to the luggage area, my bag was already on the moving belt. Cheryl had left me a message saying she was in the cell phone waiting area, so I called her and was in the car in far less time than it took to get off the plane!
Good to be home
It was great to be back home with Cheryl. As much fun as I had off by myself, I missed her company and caring ways, and it was nice to be back home with her. The only problem with this is that I am back to the place where I am recovering from a cancer operation, something I had been able to keep out of my mind for almost two weeks.
I did fine on the trip, even finding out that I am better able to swallow food and drink. I still have issues keeping food and drink in my mouth. My lips are numb on the left side, and do not seal well, so if I am not careful, I drool a lot. But it is getting better, and I am able to swallow "thicker" food. I will be doing a swallow test on my next visit to M. D. Anderson, and I hope to find out that it is time to explore more normal foods!
I have two more weeks off before school starts, so I am in my getting ready mode now. I have a website to get up and course notes to tune up for this semester's classes. I have four classes this term, two of them are my favorite class, teaching students how to program computers at the lowest level possible, assembly language. Except for three semesters, I have taught this course non-stop for almost 15 years!
Next week, I have a visit scheduled with my old "top doc", Dr. Scholl. We will be exploring my hearing, which is still not good. All the surgery on my left side has rendered my left ear pretty useless. Hearing tests say everything works fine, but there is so much extra tissue in the area, my ear canals are swelled shut, so I cannot hear much on that side. I may break down and get a hearing aid to help out. We also expect to see what Dr. Scholl thinks about my swallowing issues and get his opinion on the upcoming surgery to tune up the patchwork mess they made of my eye.
Thanks for checking in
I am continually amazed at how many folks read this blog. I keep hearing folks talk about it in unexpected places. I want to thank all of you for reading this. It helps me to write it, and I know it is helping folks get through their own adventures with cancer. I write some of these posts to help those folks, and other posts to help my students figure out what they want to be in their lives.
Cheryl and I are planning a dinner evening next week with a couple from North Austin who are going through basically the same problems I am having. We met them as a result of their finding my blog when looking for help with their own cancer adventure. Amazing thing, Google!
Thanks to all!
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