CPL Cross Country

On Saturday I carried out my CPL cross country flight, which took me up to Bullhead City, down to Yuma, then back to Goodyear. A distance of well over 400 miles, which ended up taking most of the day. There were 3 of us that carried out the trip, with 2 other guys doing their CPL but a slightly different route.
The day started at when I arrived in the crew room at 5am, ready to start planning the trip. Toddy and Mandeep were there too, and soon we had our route planned, weather brief, and flight plan filed. We were late setting off as we needed extra fuel in our planes, and Toddy had a problem with the parking brake on his, but shortly after 8am we took off and headed north.
It was a great trip - the weather was perfect, and the three of us had a nice easy flight up to Bullhead City. The door on my plane sprung open at 6500ft, and despite my best efforts I couldn't get it to re-latch properly, but it stayed in place until I landed safely at Bullhead and met up with the other guys.
We parked up, then took the free shuttle over to one of the Casinos on the other side of the river, and had a spot of lunch. After a while we headed back to the airport, and were soon on our way down to Yuma. This was a nice part of the trip, as the Colorado river runs all the way from Bullhead down to Yuma, so we pretty much just followed the river south. It had gotten a bit bumpier as the day had gone on, and we struggled to find calm air for this leg, but it wasn't ever too unpleasant. We contacted Yuma approach and were guided in one by one, and soon were parked up next to Steve and Lee, who had arrived from Ryan airport shortly before us.
We stopped there for an hour or so, grabbed a drink and chilled out while the refuel truck went to work. Soon we were heading back out for the flight back to Goodyear, which went really well.
All in all it was a great day, albeit a very long one. I've got some good pictures and videos of the trip - in the interest of health and safety it's best if I don't put them on my blog, but feel free to email me for the link to them ;-)

Meanwhile, here's a good pic I took of one of the big jets from Sky Harbor that flew overhead the other day, marking out a large 'S' in the sky.