Day 7- Good town good cops. Bad town bad cops

With a beautiful fly day expected and many an air mile planned we started this day early.
Slim flew with us in his trike from his home strip for the first 15 NM of the leg. We said goodbye via the radio and thanked him for his help and hospitality. We where all alone again in a beautiful blue sky with so much space around us. Anna-Klara was in the back using the laptop to navigate and play mp3 music through the aircrafts intercom. The air was so smooth I was able to let go of the control bar and steer using the wind resistant on the front wheel as I turned it with my feet.

This was a perfect day flying. It was so calm and beautiful and every one else was at work!!! It is times like this that we would just set up there in the sky and count our blessings. The dream was coming even more alive for us.
(Photo courtesy of Slim, click to enlarge)



(Photo of catfish ponds Mississippi Delta)

We flew for a 1.5 hours to land at a deserted airport by Water Valley, Mississippi. With no access to town we flew out of there quick smart, due south, to an x airforce base with 3 huge runways. At first there was a lot of heated discussion with Miss Navigator in the back seat who insisted we where at the right airport. We were, but I did not expect an airfield the size of London's Heathrow Airport. The little mosquito landed and taxied to the terminal. Time to chill.

That afternoon after a trip to town, we flew on for the best flight of the trip so far. In 32 degree c (90 F)we flew onto the Mississippi delta and were gifted by some very accommodating thermal there saw us circle up 500 Ft per minute letting us see even more landscape and cooling us off as we rose higher.
As we approached our destination airport Lake Providence we were beginning to be hit by a storm front some 4 MN off. I pulled on some speed and we clear the rough air.

On our final approach we where cut off from underneath by a crop duster ! 200ft separated us. God is good !!!
I circled to allow his vertex turbulence to settle and landed. He apoligised and said he did not see me. They don't use the radio out here we said ! Not a close one but close enough !


Danger on the ground !

Once we had tied down MR P we grabbed a ride into town with one of the crop duster pilots. We grabbed a beer and then some food and headed back to the airport on foot which seemed pretty normal to us but not to the local sheriff. Apparently this was not just your average local town and we were fair game for the murderers, rapists and robbers particularly as foreigners. The sheriff himself made us get in his big disgusting oversize truck.

The sheriff himself was huge and overweight. His attitude to us changed once he realised we were not necessarily vagrants but travellers just passing through.
The craziest thing to us was one of his first questions was "are you carrying guns?". When we got into the car our uneasiness with sheriff himself was not abaited when he put the car into gear and the doors locked. (Modern American cars do this automatically, but we're not used to this). He then called on the radio that he had two on board, it was like we had just been arrested. He dropped us off the airport and promised to step up patrols around us that night.

Not 5 minutes had gone by before the first cop car started shying its lights on us.
After circling around for a while, the cop drove up to us and began telling us town tales. He was very concerned when we told him we were sleeping by the aircraft that night and proceeded to shine his torch into the bushes looking for "cold blooded predators" as he called them. The whole situation was unbelievable, and rattled us a fair bit. He told us the main cause of a lot of the current violence in this town was due to hurricane Katrina.

"when that hurricane came through it blew all of the shit from there all over the country".

The night we spend there was the most uneasy night I have ever spent anywhere. We learnt when we got to the next town that the National Guard had been called in to Lake Providence recently to restore order. This experience amazed us as usually crime is only bad in big cities around the world, not in small country towns. You live and you learn I guess.