We recently flew the Waco to two great events – the American Waco Club fly-in at Creve Coeur Airport in St. Louis and the National Waco Club 50^th Reunion in Mt. Vernon, OH.  It was an excellent trip!  We had a great time at both events and at all points in between.  I’m going to break the story up into two parts so that I can cover all the details and include some photos.

We left Oshkosh on June 18^th, headed for Creve Coeur.  Our first challenge was working around (or more accurately between) two large areas of heavy rain, one in central Illinois and the other in central Iowa.  Our timing was right to catch the gap between the two storms and we had a great flight from Oshkosh to Creve Coeur, with a fuel stop in Canton, IL.

When we got to Creve Coeur the first thing we noticed was the temperature.  It was pretty warm!  When we took off from Oshkosh it was 60 degrees, so jackets were in order.  It wasn’t much different in Canton, so we put our jackets back on after our fuel stop.  But somewhere just south of Canton we found the warmer air, and by the time we landed at Creve Coeur we couldn’t get our jackets off fast enough.  This was just a preview of what was to come over the next few days!

Here’s a picture taken shortly after we arrived at Creve Coeur.  We’re parked next to Al Womak’s Waco SRE.

Dick Jackson attended both events with the one and only Waco S3HD, more commonly referred to as simply the “Waco D”.  Here’s the “D” at Creve Coeur shortly after Dick arrived.

Here’s a lineup of three beautiful Wacos including (left to right) Phil and Ruthie Coulson’s UBA, a QCF-2 belonging to John Cournoyer, and a newly-restored YKS-7.

In this picture you can see Jim Wheeler’s ZQC-6 alongside a newly restored UPF7 that features a 300 Lycoming.  I guess that would make it a HPF-7!

This was Jeri’s first time at Creve Coeur, so she took the grand tour of the Historic Aircraft Restoration Museum as well as many of the hangars on the field.  There’s always something happening at Creve Coeur, so there’s no shortage of things to look at and people to talk to.  We had a great time renewing old friendships and making new ones.

As is customary, the AWC fly-in included a Saturday morning fly-out to Aero Estates in Belleville, IL.  Mark and Elaine Harter host this event, and as usual it was a very good time.  Thanks to Mark and Elaine for their hospitality!

Here’s our Waco parked at Aero Estates next to a UPF-7 that came all the way from western Colorado to attend the fly-in!

Al Womak parked the SRE next to the Waco D are Aero Estates.

Jeri and I want to thank Phil and Ruthie Coulson and the whole AWC gang, as well as Al Styx, John Cournoyer and all the folks at Creve Coeur, for another wonderful AWC fly-in!  We had a great time and we are already looking forward to next year.

Part 2 of this story will be posted shortly.  Stay tuned!!