Heather and I wrapped up our stay in Arizona today. I took her to the airport in Phoenix, and enjoyed one last evening with my family (minus mom, who is somewhere in the skies over South America right now).
Yesterday Heather and I enjoyed a special treat. Thanks to the generosity of a friend of my sisters', we enjoyed a free night at a resort in Phoenix last night before Heather and Elise flew back to Missouri this morning. The resort had a water park, and it was really fun watching Elise take it all in. She really loved stumbling around the resort and checking out all the cool fountains. She also enjoyed one of her favorite past-times, which is getting anybody and everybody's attention that she possibly can by waving and smiling at them. At dinner last night she got to try cotton candy for the first time.
When she first saw it, she said "Bunny!" It bears a striking resemblance to the pink bunny that she got for Easter. It took her a while to convince her she was supposed to eat it.
Sharing with mommy!
After dropping Heather and Elise off at the airport, I went back to the hotel to check out and get all the odds and ends loaded in the car. When I walked out of the hotel lobby, I looked up and a Quest Kodiak aircraft passed right over the resort! This is remarkable because I understand that to date I think there only exists something like 20 or 30 Kodiaks. And most of them are overseas, serving in mission aviation. I found a really cool picture taken by an MAF pilot in Indonesia of the "old" plane, the Cessna 206 (the small plane), parked right next to the new plane, the Kodiak.
Now that's a cool picture. Our flight program in Papua plans to replace all of the Cessna 206's with Kodiaks eventually. Twice the payload, at half the fuel cost in a rugged and modern aircraft sounds pretty effective to me! Believe it or not, the Kodiak, though it is quite a bit larger, gets in and out of almost all of the same airstrips that the 206 can.