ETHNOS 360 AVIATION, 2024

 I'm excited to feature a guest writer this year.  We have Ben with us, and as a writing assignment, the kids in home school write a weekly newsletter. It gets sent to Oma Friesen in letter form, and also to us in email form. Ben did a great job of describing our trip down here, so I will feature that!

The Arizona Report

By Benjamin

Grandpa and Grandma and I made it to Arizona after nearly 2000 miles or 30 hours of driving.

We made it to Sioux City – which is right on the southeastern tip of South Dakota – on the first

day. South Dakota is similar to boring old North Dakota, but it has higher interstate speed limits

and a few more hills.

On the second day, we went southwest through Nebraska into Kansas and made it to Dodge

City, which is right in the middle of Kansas. Nebraska can be summed up in two words: corn and

irrigation for corn. Nearly every field we passed had corn stubble, and nearly every field had an

irrigation system for watering that corn. Kansas also had corn, but it had more hills and scrubby

cattle land.

We left Dodge City at around 7 o’clock in the morning on the third day in very heavy fog and

headed slowly southwest. Thankfully, by the time the sun came up the fog had lightened up

quite a bit, and by mid-morning the conditions were fine. Southwest Kansas seems to consist of

a lot of cattle land. We took smaller, slower, two-lane highways and it was pretty boring. We

exited Kansas right on the southwest corner, headed through the western tip of Oklahoma,

touched the northwestern border of Texas, and headed into New Mexico. We finally got back

on the interstate in New Mexico and headed past Sante Fe, through Albuquerque, and down to

a strange little town on the interstate called Truth or Consequences. We spent the night there.

The following morning, we continued heading down the interstate for about an hour, then took

a shortcut along several back roads to join up with interstate 10, which heads west into Arizona.

We turned off just before entering Arizona onto a small back road and headed south for a

while, and then southwest into Arizona, right down to the United States/Mexico border to a

town called Douglas. We went shopping for groceries there, and then headed north out of

Douglas to our destination – McNeal, Arizona, at the Ethnos 360 aviation base.

Today Grandpa and I worked on a few small projects. The first one was putting stone under and

around a deck that had just been built onto a trailer. We finished that by lunch, and after lunch

we started figuring out how we were going to sink two steel posts into the ground outside the

aircraft hangar. Two air conditioning units have just been installed outside the hangar, and we

need to set up some sort of a barrier so that people don’t back into them (the air conditioners

are right beside the hangar parking lot). We did a lot of humming and hawing because we were

trying to figure out if there were any power lines where we wanted to dig the holes for the

posts, and by the time we got everything ready, it was quitting time for the day.

So far, it’s been a lot of fun down here. I’ve met more people than I can remember all their

names, and one of the aircraft instructors wants to take me up in an airplane tomorrow, so

we’ll see how that goes.

For the first time in 10 years, we are in a brand new house.  It's very nice, and we feel very blessed to be in here. We built the car port last year when we were here.  

I've been baking for break, and have had help from 3 other ladies.  George and Ben have been working on cement forms for a storage shelter.  

It's been a good week of meeting volunteers that we know from the past few years, as well as the staff at the base.