Funny thing about a rental truck- the rental company wants it back, empty, on their time frame. They are all too happy to start charging some astronomical amount per day for every day that the truck is late in being returned, and they do have the credit card number to charge it to. And , in this case, my signature authorizing them to do so. So the very next order of business is to get that plane out of the truck and into my garage. Why a garage in the middle of town with nary a runway in sight, a reasonable person might ask. Because it is available space that I don't have to spend any additional money to use. Seems like a reasonable solution to a slightly unreasonable situation. As it took about 4.5 (there were 5 of us on site but only room for 4 on the plane for loading, the .5 guy was for moral support) people to load the plane onto the truck it was going to take more than one to unload it. True, gravity will be working with us on the unloading but none the less I needed a crew to get this job done and still have a project worth doing. And a crew I did get. The two guys that you can see in the pictures are Bill, brown coat, and Dave, green coat. Unseen is the lovely Miss Marlys who was handling the ropes in the nose of the truck. Bill and Dave are my regular Saturday morning flying partners and without hesitation or question they showed up ready to work. With a bit of trepidation, some seat of the pants engineering, that safety rope wrapped around the internal truck box frame and a mighty heave ho, like a baby being born, that plane popped out of the truck and into the waiting arms of my side of the garage. My side of the garage because I did have to promise the lovely Miss Marlys that she would be parking her car in her side of the garage before the snow did fly. I must confess that although I did indeed get her car back into the garage before the snow did fly, it was only because winter mercifully held off all thru December. So N5215H is safe, snug and dry, tucked away waiting for rebirth.
