If you count all the legs, I think I finally broke 20 miles. If you don't count all the legs, I only did 12 miles.
Long story short, got over 9000 feet MSL. Landed just west of Markham. happy.
slightly longer story:
After a bunch of hanging around at launch, getting pinned on the ridge, picking out alternate LZs, etc... I finally got lucky and found a thermal that actually took me up. (way up) never been so high on a PG! saw a couple of planes way below me.
flew from Dickey's along 55 to I66. Followed I 66 for a bit. ran away from big dark scary cloud which was trying to take me to Dulles. tried to jump to cloud street to south. flew over (names from topo map at google) High Knob, West of Ravendsen Rock, to the end of the sorta ridge, almost to Huntly, then gave up my into the wind track, not being able to make much headway and just followed the lift back north.
Bobbled around in front and over Rattlesnake Mountain for a good bit, but never got high again. Scrabbled hard and fruitlessly around HardscrabbleMountain, flew a bit NW over no-name mountain, where I thought I would topland. Urgh... what a hike out that would have been.
Fell over the back and landed between Bell Meade and Markham.
very exciting landing, as the nice big field I had initially picked out turned out to have some expensive looking horses hanging out under some trees. baled to someone's front yard. barely cleared powerlines, barely cleared high trees and didn't clear a little blooming tree.
nice neighbor across the road gave me a bottle of ice cold water.
nice Ben and Jeff retrieved me
Jeff fresh from his own XC.made a bunch of mistakes. hopefully will learn from them. for now i'm happy though.
-- ellis
