Flying Around America-In The Path of Lindbergh

27/08/2021

Several folks have asked about our trip and what our intensions are. After a few weeks into our adventure, it became clear it was far more work than what we had anticipated, given the current world we live in. Here are several of those factors; unexpectedly, the fires out west reduced visibility over most of the eastern US (sometimes to 5-10 Miles), unusually large sections of the eastern US had severe weather that you could not get around on a continuing basis, not unexpectedly Covid-19 had different requirements in every state. However, this also resulted in a large lack of staffing in many businesses that reduced their ability to take care of customers and services. Hot breakfast in a hotel became a sack, laundry facilities and business centers were closed, room cleaning service is no longer offered, they will bring you fresh towels. We spent a large time each day flying the trip and then planning the next day, when we could determine what the weather and availability of lodging/transportation would be, and then what would we do when we got there. You cannot check in until 3, out by noon, so sometimes we arrived too early, and had to hang around.....
All that being said, we got to see family, I got to fly into the center of forbidden flight, in Washington DC. We made it to Atlantic City, Niagara Falls, Gettysburg battle field, up to Maine, saw friends in New Hampshire, around lake Eire to Michigan, by Lake Michigan, around Chicago to Wisconsin, across to Lexington, down to Memphis, across Mississippi and Alabama and back to Georgia. 25 States in a little over 3 weeks. We tried to get to Florida but severe weather for a couple of days then a coming hurricane, pushed us back to Sandersville a few days earlier than we hoped for. We decided to break our 48 state trip into parts, and do all states east of the Mississippi River, on the first part which we did, except Fla. As we go through our pictures we will post more for yo to see. Thanks for following the first part, now we have a house to build and then maybe the next part.
Jim Croome

11/08/2021

Today didn’t turn out as expected. We left Memphis this AM and landed in Mississippi. When we left Ms. for Birmingham and/or Montgomery then we ran into trouble. Storms blew up way earlier than expected and much more intense than projected. We landed twice and finally ended up at a B&B in Fayette, Al. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better but forecast are for the same weather then a Hurricane. 😳
Might have to head home, to a better port in the storm.

11/08/2021

11/08/2021

11/08/2021

Good Evening!

We’ve had a very busy day. The first picture that you see is the Peabody Hotel and the famous ducks. It really is pretty. The next few pics are of Beale street. The famous Blues Street in Memphis.

This morning we got up and went to Graceland. These are photos of the house, estate, his cars, toys, outfits, medals, and his airplanes. It’s actually hard to believe, but nothing at all ever mentioned the fact that Elvis’ money and fame never really bought him happiness. Look at how he died…there was no mention of the details of that either.

After the pics of Elvis and Graceland, you will see some pictures of the Pyramid and Bass Pro Shop. Really a neat place to go.

Finally there are pictures of the outside of St.Jude Children’s’ Research Hospital. It is totally closed due to COVID. Only Parents and staff.
Such a bless for our children with childhood cancer.

09/08/2021

Hello Friends,

We left Glascow, Kentucky this morning with a wonderful ride from Candy, a precious lady that we met at the hotel yesterday. We had talked with her and told her that Ubers and Lyfts were nonexistent in Glascow. She had said we get her to take us today if we were unable to get an Uber or Lyft. Candy came to our rescue this morning and we had a wonderful talk about our families and how we must trust the Lord to supply us daily with His Promises and love. God bless you Candy.

Flying to Memphis was very long and visibility was terrible. I do love sunflowers, they are so typical of a summer day. I was able to capture a couple of fields from 6k ft. Even from over a mile up, they made me smile…like a summer ray of sunshine. 🌻🌝🌞

We landed in Memphis after two and half hours, tired and ready for lunch. Our Uber driver, A young mother of two girls, had lost her husband to COVID in November. Her 4 year old was hospitalized for over two weeks and very sick also. This young lady told us how she had gone through the grief process, how she was mad at God and how she could not understand how God could allow this to happen. Then, she had realized she had to be strong for her girls. She started putting her life back together and then just a couple of months ago she was car jacked at gun point. She was a blessing to me and Jim. We talked with her and encouraged her. She told us she was in the area where the car jacking had taken place and she had vowed to never go there again only to have God nudge her there today. She told us she knew God had put us together to help her. God is so good, even when we can’t see His hand, we can trust His heart.

Downtown was a bit slow tonight with it being Sunday. We did have good BBQ at Central’s right down from the Lorraine’s Hotel where Martin Luther King was killed. The food was delicious!

We hope to really get to explore the city tomorrow. We plan to do a tour, must see Graceland, and everything else we can fit in. We will be here a couple of days.

Hope all is going well with you all! We live in such a special country! We are so blessed! I pray one day we can all be united and not so divided.
LOVE GOD……LOVE PEOPLE! 😘

09/08/2021

Made it to Memphis Tennessee. Long 2.7 hour flight, fighting a head wind. Sights of Memphis today.

08/08/2021

Headed to Memphis tomorrow for a couple of days. What should we do there? Where to go?

07/08/2021

Interesting day. Left Lexington for Huntington West Virginia, in and out of clouds on that leg. Left Huntington at noon for Glasgow, Ky. That’s is 2 hrs from Memphis by our plane and that is Tomorrow’s destination, and for a few days. The second leg had more weather and we had to go north of our intended route for moderate rain. Captions on theses pictures.

07/08/2021

Hi Friends!

We are in Lexington, Kentucky tonight. We flew almost 4 hours today because of weather coming in. We woke up in Wisconsin, flew to Illinois, I
Indiana and then here. If you have never been, it is a place to see.

It was obvious that the huge farms had taken on a change, trees dotted the landscape, fences surrounded the pastures, and horses were in the fields!

The airport that we landed, LEX…Lexington Bluegrass Airport, is big. You can see pics of the FBO that we tied up with. Impressive!

Everywhere we have been, there has been one common thread, HELP WANTED SIGNS EVERYWHERE! If there is anyone in this country that needs a job, if they get out and look, they can find one!

We are going to West Virginia tomorrow and then will work our way to Memphis on Sunday. We are going to stay there a couple of days to eat BBQ and then on to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Home by next weekend if the Lord is willing.

We are such a blessed nation! So much land that is planted with food to feed the world. Such beautiful countryside! But, there is NO PLACE LIKE HOME!

See you tomorrow…✈️🌽🌽🌽🛸🚀

06/08/2021

We made it to Illinois and Wisconsin. Circled west of Chicago.

05/08/2021

Flying across state borders is always strange. In the screen shot on the left you can see I’m leaving Michigan and entering Illinois. To the right you can see I’m almost at the border also of Michigan and Ohio. On the right screen shot I’m half way in Ohio and Pennsylvania. 😳

04/08/2021

Hey Y’all!

Today has been so wonderful! As we left Ithaca, NY this morning it was amazing to see the hundreds of farms. Even more amazing way the many shades of green In each of these patches. I was totally glued to the window. ( good thing Jim was flying!) it so amazes me the beauty from the sky. We are able to see a bigger part of the picture, God sees it all, made it all, knows it all.🙏

We flew about 90 mins and arrived at Niagara Falls. It was so awesome! The Canadian border is closed so we were unable to go into Canada to view the total horseshoe. What we saw was perfect. Only God can make a waterfall like this, and He showed up and showed out by giving us a beautiful rainbow so we would not forget His promise to us.

After lunch, back to the air. We are finally out of the crowded NE. It was very beautiful, interesting, and wonderful to see however we will not miss the crowed airspace! We had a long flight to Akron, Ohio, about 2.5 hours. This is the home of the Kent State University. The airport (FBO), at which we landed was the home of a WWII military training base. When you see the pics, you will also see the Goodyear Blimp. We shared airspace with it and then got to watch it fly over. Exciting and great for Jim, made his day!

UPDATE, our plans have changed! We are planning to finish all the states east of the Mississippi, plus Minnesota and Maybe a couple others. We feel that by then we will have had enough living in hotels and traveling in a small plane for awhile. Will finish the trip later if the Lord is willing.

See you tomorrow in Michigan and then on to Indiana!
God Bless!

03/08/2021

Good Evening!

We are in New York State tonight. We left NH for Vermont and on to NY. The pics that you will see show another side of God’s creation, the beautiful sky. We had a very long flight for a small plane 2.7 hours. It was very windy, very bumpy but amazingly beautiful.

As a teenager, when I was in youth choir we sang a song about cotton candy clouds so fluffy and white! That was my view. I had so many illusions of animals, faces, flowers, all put there by our Heavenly Father. Thank you for being such an awesome God….we know that You know every drop of rain that falls, the wind that blows, our every thought,and You know our hearts.

We are in Ithaca, NY. It is the home of Cornell University. It has many waterfalls in the area and it borders Lake Cayuga. Niagara Falls is about 150 miles away.

Hopefully we will see Niagara Falls tomorrow. Looking forward to some good pics.

Thank you all for your prayers and for following. See you in the clouds☁️🛬🛩✈️

03/08/2021

When we were leaving Concord NH I saw these pictures on a display case. We are loosely falling Lindbergh’s path and here’s proof he was here in 1927. Here is a picture I took, I believe, of the same hangar,still there.

01/08/2021

Up, up, and away,

I could not post yesterday because of the internet, sorry, will try to catch you up.

On Saturday we went to Massachusetts, wanted to have a Tea Party, but there has been an outbreak of COVID. We would not take the risk. Seems that each state reacts differently, just hope it holds off. We flew over lots of farmland. Beautiful patchwork quilt that has been made by our hardworking farmers.

We are now In Concord, NH. Mountains seem to loom to our NW. This is a lovely city, we have enjoyed walking and watching people. So much outdoor living which seems to be the trend.

We had a delightful dinner last night with some travel friends, Steve and Jesse. We have gone many places around the world with them and now had the opportunity to share their little part of the world with them in NH. We ate outside at a little restaurant, the weather was so nice, in the high 60’s. Great to reconnect!

This morning, the weather cooperated for us to fly to Kennebunk, MA. We did not get Maine lobster but we realize that we can’t do everything that we would desire to do. If we did, we would NEVER make it home.

Tomorrow we leave for Vermont and then to New York, if the weather cooperates. We do hope to get to go to Niagara and view the beautiful falls. If not, that will be on my BUCKET LIST, will have to fly back commercially.

Hope you all have experienced a wonderful Sunday! We are so blessed!
Flying away in our little plane ✈️

31/07/2021

We made it to Mass. and Concord, NH the state capital.

31/07/2021

Happy Friday to our FB followers,

First, I have additional pictures from Gettysburg that we had not been able to transfer from our big camera to iPad. Just a few words about them.

The fields that you see are where the 3 day battle took place. Note the fences, They are built this way because the ground is very rocky being at the foot of the mountains. Holes could not be dug so the placement of the logs supported each other. The farmers plowed their fields and removed the rocks in order to be able to plant their fields. In doing so, they made rock walls that surround the fields. These walls provided a bit of protection as the Confederate soldiers tried to get up the hill to the Union troops awaiting them. It’s hard to tell, but the fields really are rolling, they could top a hill without being noticed. Many topped the hill to be blasted by canon or gun fire.

If you could imagine Robert E. Lee encouraging his troops on just a little farther. The first day, July 1st was a huge success, no one thought he could be defeated. However, he was human…too much amo had been used on the first day and even more on the second…he just had too little to finish the job on July 3rd. 45,000 men lay in the fields shot, 7000 dead.

The union troops and their families came to the site after the battle and found their dead and wounded, they left the Confederate troops dead and wounded in the fields. Many were buried in shallow graves, some just left.

I thought that July 3rd would have been hot and the stench of death would have drawn birds and animals to devour the bodies. I was told that after three days of continuous firing, the smoke was so thick that it blocked the sun and made it hard to breathe. It was eerily quite, no birds, no animals. Even pets had run away.

I could go on, but I guess the teacher in me got carried away.

Today we flew to Connecticut. We wanted to fly up the Hudson River around the Statue of Liberty and see all of the sights, but it was too windy and cloudy. We did fly over some of the Pocono Mountains making a bumpy ride even more so. We flew along Long Island Sound! Beautiful, house that would take a month to clean!

On to Rhode Island. what an absolutely beautiful leg of our journey. We were over one peninsula after another. I can not begin to describe the views that we saw. We in America are so very prosperous, and wasteful! We all have so much to be thankful for, God has given us so much. We need to be ever mindful of from where our blessings come.

I’m gonna post the pics of Rhode Island and Connecticut in a different post. Don’t go away.

Please pray for us, COVID is getting really bad up here. Massachusetts had a large breakout from July 4th activities. 75% of those cases were people who had been fully vaccinated, and they tested positive for the new strain.

See you in the sky. ✈️

30/07/2021

Hello friends,

Today was a wonderful day. We enjoyed seeing God’s beautiful countryside. Corn 10 feet high, field after field not five feet from the highway. The fields are so lush and green. Beautiful!

As we headed out to Gettysburg to see the infamous Gettysburg battlefields, we had our first view of the mountains over which Robert E. Lee led his troops. The view was too beautiful to believe that over 7000 men lost their lives on this battlefield and another 45,000 were wounded in a three day period. So hard to imagine the bodies, the pain, the loss.

We went on a guided tour which went around the battlefield, we were able to see houses that were hit by the gunfire, barns hit by canon fire and so much more. Hundreds of monuments have been erected from states that had soldiers fighting. Original canons are still on the battlefield, they are refurbishment periodically as you can
see in a picture that is in the post. Also, there is a part of a tree that was cut down and displayed. If you look closely you can see balls that are placed in a cylindrical shell and fired. They scattered like shotgun fire.

After the battlefield, we went to the cyclorama of the battle. This is the largest oil on canvas that has ever been painted. 43’X 350’ (not exact).
This painting was done by an artist, Paul Philippoteaux. He talked to soldiers, got them to take him to the battlefield where he recreated what they had seen. It was so lifelike and very moving to realize that both sides were losers with the number of casualties that took place.

On to Hershey! I could almost taste the chocolate! All Croome’s love chocolate! As we arrived, we saw rollercoasters, water rides, all sorts of theme park attractions. Great for kids but we don’t have ours with us! On to the chocolate factory…build your own kiss? Make a candy bar with sprinkles? Decorate a chocolate kiss? Well, great for kids….but, you know, we left them behind. We could pay Twice the price for a candy bar, but we are already paying twice the price for rooms. The airplane is too full to carry chocolate and it melts. Ok, next time we’ll bring kids and really enjoy Hershey, PA. The best part about it, the smell and the beautiful flowers.

We are off tomorrow to Connecticut and Rhode Island. Can’t go up the Hudson River tomorrow, winds will be gusting too high. Maybe later.

Still having difficulties with pictures, can’t get them from one device to the other. Hopefully soon we will have the kinks worked out.

Thanks for following us. Keep praying for our safety and enjoy!✈️

29/07/2021

Today we left NJ and landed in Delaware and Pennsylvania. Tonight and tomorrow, we are in Lebanon Pa. weather coming back in tomorrow. The airport is basically in a corn field.

28/07/2021

I’m so sorry that I didn’t post last night, we had computer issues.

Yesterday was fun! We drove to the shore, realizing that the topography is so much like Georgia. Lots of green fields, lots of farmland.

Atlantic City, the Jersey Shore, absolutely came up on us from no where. The casinos 🎰 were EVERYWHERE, massive, and elaborate. We were able to park and walk to the board walk! WOW! What a sight. Everything you could imagine. (Some you would never want to imagine!) We enjoyed a lunch at Johnny Rockets. Had a sq**rt bottle to fight off the birds.

After sitting and watching, we walked around and decided to leave. You could watch the people all day, but you would only see much of the same.

Our drive back was nice just getting to see the countryside.
We will fly to Delaware and Pennsylvania today. I’ll add more pics of Jersey shore tonight. My tablet is not very cooperative today.

Have a safe day.✈️

28/07/2021

Took part of a day off and went to the Board Walk in Atlantic City, NJ. I had a hospital board meeting by video conference and then we went to the beach.

27/07/2021

Hello friends, Monday, July 26,2021

Today has been a beautiful day and we praise God for safe travels. The sun has shone all day, however there still is smog from the fires out west. We were not able to see a lot of the sights we had hoped to see, but it was still beautiful.

We left DC for NJ this morning around 11:00. The majority of our flight was over water, with land in the distance. Jim is so cautious, I was not fearful at all.

I constantly look out the windows and I’m amazed at all of the homes. My thoughts today were of all the people, thousands upon thousands, and our Father knows each one by name. He knows their every thought, theirs hurts, their fears, and their dreams. He also loves each one as only He can. He made us all to bring Him glory…I fall short too often!

During our flight we flew over the Chesapeake Bay, let me tell you, we saw mansions. Multimillionaire homes. I hope these people are happy and know our Lord. I’m in awe of His grace and mercy today.

We are going to Atlantic City tomorrow, I’m so excited to see what is in store for us.

Be safe, see you tomorrow✈️🇺🇸🎡🎢⛱🚤 Atlantic City

26/07/2021

Left Washington DC this AM for Millville, NJ. crossed over the Chesapeake Bay, once again weather was poor and vis was not very good.

26/07/2021

What a wonderful day. There is very high smog and high winds so we are staying in Washington,DC with our nephew and his family one more night.

Robbie decided a bike ride was a great way to see DC while Jim worked on flight plans and logistics. Robbie, with 3 year old Lawrence in tow, and I got out the bikes and headed down town.

Our first stop was Reagan National Airport. We rode the bikes right past the airport to a grass field at the end of the runway which was covered with tourists. Picinics, naps on the grass, lunches, and on lookers were enjoying a wonderful Sunday afternoon. Approximately every sixty seconds a huge jet came flying in right over our heads, maybe 100 feet above us. It was AMAZING!!!!!! Lawrence was thrilled as was I.

After resting for about 15 minutes, and watching bunches of jets land, we decided to head in closer to the mall. The Washington monument was in sight, I had to endure! We made it!!!! What a beautiful sight!!The Jefferson Memorial behind us the Washington monument in front of us, we had done it! What an accomplishment! How beautiful!

After arriving back home, 10 miles, my legs felt like jello. IT WAS SO WORTH IT!

For dinner tonight, we walked downtown to have pizza and a salad. There is such a wonderful atmosphere here. Outside dining, everyone walking their dogs or strollers. This is a side of Washington DC only seen by an insider! Thank you Robbie and Rebecca! What wonderful family time!

Tomorrow we are off to New Jersey! See in our post tomorrow.
Take care, MaryAnn and Jim

25/07/2021

We made it to DC/ Maryland. No problems.

24/07/2021

Good morning,

Today Jim and I will be flying into Washington, DC. This is the most restricted area in the US and Jim had to go through special background checks and interviews along with special fingerprints to get clearance to fly into the area. We thought that was complex until this morning when he filed his flight plan….I’m surprised he didn’t have to have his DNA test done. We will fly out at 12:30, say a prayer that all goes well.

Thus far, we have had a big learning experience. What to take with us each day, are we packed efficiently, where is this and where is that? We are managing but look forward to being able to relax through all of this.

We have enjoyed seeing family and spending time with them. Tonight we will be with Jim’s sister’s son, Robbie, and his his family. We have been to DC before, on more than one occasion, but we are looking forward to seeing things from an insiders point of view.

The next few days will be congested, hotels to book, sights to see….the adventure is really on.

Thank you for following us. Send us a comment.

Leaving on a small plane, don’t know when we’ll be back again.
45 more states to see.

✈️🏙

24/07/2021

Got to spend this afternoon with my nephew Bill and his girls. Went by Hollywood Cemetery where 2 Presidents are buried. May May got Emerson in trouble.