Off to the frozen north!

In the grand scheme of things, Scotland is just a little place really. Pretty much as far as you can drive in Scotland is 6 ½ hrs from the very north of the mainland to the English border, and if you just want to go east to west, you can dip your toe in the Forth, then have that same toe in the Clyde with 1 ½ hrs. It took us a while to get used to driving for 8 hours to see our friends in North Carolina when we first moved over here, but you quickly adjust and now we don’t think too much of getting in the car to make that trip. The next few months are going to see a couple of journey’s that are definitely the longest road trips the Swanson clan has ever made!

Missionary Flights International, Florida

In mid March we will be travelling down to Florida to work with MFI for 3 weeks. That will help me get a few week’s worth of experience on the kind of routine “line maintenance” work that will be more in keeping with what I’ll be doing for MAF in a year’s time. We are planning on taking a bit of vacation time while we are in Florida, and then on the way back North I have a turbine engine course to attend in North Carolina, so we will have a stop-over there for a week or so on our way home. All that said, the trip to Ft Pierce, FL is over 1000 miles and will take us 15 or 16 hrs of driving each way.

Before we make the family trip south next month I have been asked to go on another Rapid Response trip to help with some repairs to the wings of a Cessna 206. This particular plane is used by Northern Youth Programs as part of their ministry reaching into the remotest parts of north western Ontario. 

To give you an idea of the size of Ontario, when we visited Niagara Falls in our first year here, we drove north-east-ish for 4 ½ hrs from Coshocton and spent a couple of days in the south east corner of the province. To get to Dryden (which is only a couple of hundred miles inside Canada, in the south western corner of the Ontario) we will have to drive for 20 hours from here! It is a big place! Aircraft are really a valuable tool where the distances travelled are so big, and so the little bit of help we can give to get the plane back in service as soon as possible is really appreciated. NYP have one full time mechanic working on their aircraft, so having volunteer’s helping out on major projects like this is a big help to them. The repairs have been made to one of the wings after a group of volunteer mechanics recently went up to spend some time there, so we are going to do the same work on the other wing. Hopefully we will be able to help them put the plane back in service in the next few weeks, so that NYP can continue to serve in the way God has called them to.

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Our route up to Canada...

Later today I will be setting off with Bob Schwartz (the training director and a qualified mechanic) and his family for probably the longest road trip of my time in America. We are planning on leaving Coshocton around 15:00 this afternoon, then drive as far as we can through Indiana before finding a motel. Then we’ll be carrying on to the north end of Minnesota on Monday and finally the last few hundred miles up to Dryden on Tuesday.

I will post another blog sometime with a bit more about what I’m up to, but right now I need to go and pack…