First stop was Fort Myers. The flight over was very smooth, a nice easy landing and the guy in the tower was very friendly, manning both tower and ground frequencies that late at night. The airport is being developed, so he guided us along some unlighted taxiways and we parked up at the executive terminal. The ramp guy gave us a lift from the plane to the terminal in his stretch golf cart, and it was on to the cookie sampling. Very moist and not even slightly stale. Impressive for so late at night. We took a break in the pilots lounge for a bit, then headed for Boca Raton. Flying accross the centre of florida was amazing. A huge expanse of darkness below us, with the exception of a couple of fires which seemed to be burning pretty well. The approach to Boca was interesting. We had so much trouble making out the airport amongst all of the lights of the city. It's alongside I-95 and final approach takes you low over a highrise building and then over a major road junction at about 200ft. The Executive terminal there was again a very nice facility. The ramp guys there were all watching a basketball game, but one of them brought us a cup of coffee and chatted a bit. But the shock of the evening was that the promised cookies were nowhere to be found. I'm pretty sure it was due to the late-night arrival, so we will have to go back during the day to complete the challenge.
We've also done a couple of morning flights. One to Naples was very nice, and they have excellent coffee.
We looked at a flightschool there which does training for the JAA licencing. My co-pilot is more interested than I am at the moment. It's all way too expensive for me. we did a flight up to Daytona Beach which really convinced me that night flying is the way to go. Daytona Approach were really busy with all the flights going on, and one pilot on the same frequency as us managed to fly into somone's airspace and was 'given a number'. Something I hope never happens to me. They made other mistakes with us as well, flying us through the localizer course and having to turn us back, and forgetting to give us a frequency to handover to Orlando Approach on the way back. On top of that they tried to charge us a ramp fee in Daytona Beach, so we left without even a cup of coffee. Our next stop was Lakeland, which was a total contrast. Freindly controller and a nice FBO with a restaurant which we will have to visit later.
The weekend was a total bust. We had planned to fly up to St. Augustine to go to a nice restaurant on the shore, but our plane was grounded for maintainance. Yesterday the weather hit Florida pretty bad. There might be a Tropical Storm coming in. We had planned to go down to Key West and hang out on the Beach for a bit, but in the end we decided the weather was too bad for us to even take off from Ft. Pierce. It turned out it was a good decision. A plane crashed on takeoff right around the time we were scheduled to go. Apparently it was an engine failure, which shouldn't lead to a crash on a twin, but the weather might have been a factor. The weather looks bad today as well, we're on the schedule tonight so we'll have to see if it clears up. At least I have a good reminder not to go if I have any doubts.