I love to fly the Santa Barbara region with my precious wife Anne in our 172Q named Tripp. Q means it's a regular 1983 Cessna 172 Skyhawk, but with a larger engine that enables us to actually carry four average-sized adults and some baggage. It's only 12% more power, but gives us nearly twice the takeoff performance most of the time and still gets up to 20mpg. Can you tell we love her? Click here to see our blog and "fly along" on our assorted adventures, or to Contact me directly.

As you can see we also enjoy taking snapshots while in the air and sharing them here, in the EdHat.com Local News section (link for my contributions there), and on my Wikipedia pages. Note that some of my CC-licensed photos on Wikipedia and Wikimedia are smaller versions of identical copyrighted photos here on Flickr.

Our blog has many more photos along with descriptions of our various Big Adventures flying in every U.S. state including Hawaii (in rented planes, since Tripp can't carry us both across the Pacific). We've also flown all the Canadian provinces and the Bahamas. In the planes of some friendly (and merciful when they saw our pleading eyes) "Kiwis" and some rentals we even got to fly both main New Zealand islands in small planes!

Here at home we started out flying a zippy Grumman AA5B named Tiger and an older C-172M named Flash. We're not rich, it's just that both of those planes were owned by the Santa Barbara Flying Club and that means we could often fly for $95 per hour. We prefer flying half an hour per week rather than buying a couple of lattes a day. Now that we have Tripp, because we're flying more often it's still affordable.

Cameras:

*Nikon D5300, Tamron superzoom

*Nikon D5100, Sigma DC 18-200mm f3.5-6.3 II HSM (Anne's camera)

*Canon Poweshot Elph 300HS (formerly Anne's camera)

Editing:

*Apple MacBook (2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB)

*GraphicConverter 4.5 (mostly) and 9.7.5

*Photoshop CS8 (rarely)

*GIMP (if I ever have time to learn this great free tool).