Back to the Bricks | Part 4, Remembrance

Circle of Life

If resistance breeds character, then our personal character arcs must have developed significantly on the long trek south of Lake Erie to Flint, MI. Simultaneously held aloft and hindered by an atmosphere moving opposite our course at 40 knots, our groundspeed was sometimes depressed as low as 70 knots. Such struggle seemed pertinent considering the purpose of our flight that day.

Though I was solo in April when I last made the trek to Flint ("Back to the Bricks | Part 2, Chrysalis"), this time I was joined by Kristy and The Bear. The April trip was fueled by nostalgia and hopeful investment in the future, but our purpose two months later was mournful remembrance. Just three days after I visited him in April, my Uncle Brian passed away ("Back to the Bricks | Part 3, Many Meetings"). We were returning to memorialize not only him, but to attend a celebration of life for one of Kristy's high school friends being held on the very same day.

Pushing forward against the headwind allowed significant time for reflection. Increasingly, our visits to Michigan are initiated by the loss of loved ones. We have reached that age where we attend more funerals than weddings.

Dimensional Intersection

Warrior 481 ready to go outside our hangar in Sodus. Photo by The Bear.

A large puddle on the ramp outside our hangar seemed to provide a window into an alternative universe, perhaps one in which we had not lost those dear to us. Maybe in that universe, we were flying off on a grand adventure. I resisted the urge to dive headfirst into that universe -- probably for the best due to a number of fanciful and practical reasons alike -- and readied 481 to fly in this world instead.

June 12, 2026: Second Run for the "Roll Your Own" Routing

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
12 Jun 2026	N21481	SDC (Sodus, NY) - FNT (Flint, MI)	4.6	3164.5

For the April trip, I spent some time determining a suitable route through the Cleveland and Detroit Bravo airspaces given a lack of airways. The routing that I filed for that flight ("Back to the Bricks | Part 1, Modernization") was successful and I recycled it for this trip. Still, I would have much preferred to set out directly across Canada as in years past.

Headwinds are fun?

At 6,000 feet, we were largely above the clouds, though we rumbled through enough of them that I logged 0.3 hours of IMC (instrument meteorological conditions) time that afternoon.

Rural western NY in all its verdant glory.

Chautauqua Lake in western NY.

"Almost an island" in Erie, PA.

Railyard outside of Cleveland, OH.

A marina on Lake Erie east of Cleveland,

Downtown Cleveland and Burke Lakefront Airport.

The Cleveland waterfront.

Downtown Cleveland.

Modifications underway at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Steamship William G Mather.

As we flew along the Cleveland waterfront, I flipped the isolation switch on the audio panel back to "all" so that The Bear could hear me again. "There it is!" I pointed at the freighter below.

"Oh, is that the ship that hates you?" responded The Bear with more glee than I would have preferred.

Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.

Kristy called my attention to a freighter below whose wake genuinely suggested that it was doing doughnuts in Lake Erie.

Angular, flat, rural. Ohio.

Fenton, MI with Silver Lake (left) and Lake Ponemah (right).

Silver Lake is a really popular lake name in Michigan. I personally know of at least four of them including this one in Fenton, MI and the one outside Traverse City where I trained for my seaplane rating.

We followed US-23 northbound from Ann Arbor. Ahead, where US-23 diverted around Flint's Bishop International Airport, we could see runway 18-36 and its parallel taxiway directly in line with the divided highway.

Back to the Bricks

The Bear and Kristy after putting pajamas on Warrior 481.

Following our arrival to Bishop International Airport, we were marshaled to parking at Flint's only FBO, AvFlight. Our aeronautical route was not the only parallel with the prior trip in April. As before, I had an Enterprise rental waiting at AvFlight and a room reserved at the cool downtown Flint Hilton Garden Inn. The biggest difference this time around was availability of a skilled ground crew to assist with the cover (pictured above).

After my previous visit ("Back to the Bricks | Part 2, Chrysalis"), I returned from Flint with tales of the tall chairs in AvFlight that a very tiny Little Bear once used years prior to pull herself to a standing position for the first time. But when we entered the AvFlight lobby, we discovered that they were gone. Disappointed that we would not be able to photograph a reenactment with an adult Bear, we learned from AvFlight staff that the lobby furniture had finally been retired ("those chairs were really old!") and relocated to a maintenance hangar.

I flexed my wayfinding instincts and navigated to downtown Flint from memory. We parked in the large public lot at the corner of Kearsley and Saginaw, set diagonally across the intersection from the Hilton Garden Inn that was originally built in 1920 as the Genesee County Savings Bank. Beyond it stood the Huntington Bank building bearing Flint's iconic weather ball.

That night, we drove to the west side to meet my college roommate Jason and our friend Cher for dinner at Grill of India. The restaurant was located in LinCor Plaza at the intersection of Linden and Corunna Roads, a plaza that was also home to Rider's Hobby Shop that Kristy remembered as a favorite nerd destination from childhood. It was evidently the place in Flint to get Dungeons & Dragons miniatures. Sadly, she never got that cool dragon miniature she had her eye on. We had a great evening with good food and lots of laughs with Jason and Cher -- at least until we overstayed our welcome and the restaurant owners kicked us out. It was kind of like being in college again.

When we returned to the hotel that night, downtown Flint was abuzz with activity and the weather ball was lit in all its glory. "When the weather ball is red, higher temperatures ahead," Kristy recited from memory. Indeed, the next day was a hot one.

Downtown Flint's brick Saginaw Street and the iconic "Vehicle City" arches.

June 13, 2026: Remembrance

Saturday June 13 was a day to remember, relive, and celebrate what was past.

We started off the day in Sauce, the Italian restaurant occupying the ground floor of our hotel that preserved the circular vault door from the original bank. After breakfast, we walked through the University of Michigan - Flint campus. Though I had been back a few times over the years ("Back to the Bricks | Part 2, Chrysalis"), it was Kristy's first return in two decades to the campus where we originally met.

University Pavilion.

At the heart of McKinnon Plaza.

The building where I spent most of my time was completed a year before I started college.

This mural most certainly did not date back to our time on campus.

We drove to Imlay City for my uncle's funeral. It was good to see family and pay tribute to my wonderful uncle. Being there to pay my respects was very important to me. Uncle Brian was someone who always had my back. I was evidently not alone in that mindset. My cousin Scott, who vanished thirteen years ago and cut his ties with the family, reappeared for his father's service. While I saw him from across the room, I did not have opportunity to speak with him and, when the service was over, he vanished again. It was as though he'd never been there at all.

We returned to the hotel to change clothes before venturing back out. The night before, I talked about my discovery on the April trip that the house in Flint's East Village that Jason and I shared during the early 1990s was gone. Jason noted that he went looking for our first house on Branch Road in Flint Township and was unable to find it. He hypothesized that it was gone as well.

That seemed unlikely, so Kristy, Claire and I set out to find the house I lived in twenty-five years ago. I studied a map beforehand, but found that most of the landmarks along the way were familiar. We followed I-475 north to the Stewart Avenue exit, where a shooting occurred just prior to us moving to Branch Road that caused Kristy's mother to be wary of any passage through that interchange. We continued past the former wooden pallet storage yard (now mostly empty), through the small neighborhood of identical low end housing, and finally reached Branch Rd.

Four of us moved into that house on Branch Road in February of 1991. During the move in, Chris and I dropped a refrigerator on Jason when he stumbled over a snowbank while the three of us carried it. The experience in that house went downhill from there, between multiple interpersonal issues and unreliable heat. The place was a "bilevel" or "raised ranch", with the main floor half a story above ground and the bottom level (the "garden level") half below ground. It was sided all in white with tall white pillars flanking the front entrance. It was the only house of that style on the road. 

"There it is," Kristy pointed. We passed it quickly, but I processed that the house had not aged well. It was missing siding, the paved driveway had regressed back to gravel, the front entry pillars were now brown -- whether due to paint or loss of white fascia, I cannot say -- and the front yard was cluttered with stuff. Near the doorway, someone was sitting in a rocking chair. In a moment, we were past it.

"That looked pretty rough," I commented to Kristy, who agreed. The Google street view image taken a year earlier looks exactly the way I remember from our drive-by, right down to someone sitting in a rocking chair by the door. I wonder if it's the same guy? (The address in the image is wrong, but close enough.) 

From there, we followed back roads to Kristy's home town. The celebration of life was being hosted by my brother-in-law's parents. Because the deceased was friends with both of Kristy's sisters and particularly close to my brother-in-law Nate, the memorial also reunited Kristy's siblings from their homes in different states.

Despite being an outsider who did not know the deceased, I was delighted by the entire concept of the gathering; food, drink, and fond remembrances shared of a beloved friend by those who knew him best. The stories were fun, occasionally profane, and retold with great love. It was exactly the kind of warm, humanistic gathering that my uncle deserved instead of a sterile church service delivered by an officiant who could have substituted the name of any person into his canned patter without changing a thing.

June 14, 2026: A Change in the Weather

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
14 Jun 2026	N21481	FNT (Flint, MI) - SDC (Sodus, NY)	3.3	3167.8

We departed Flint into low weather and rain, another parallel with my previous visit in April, but with fewer concerns about icing. Directly off runway 27, we entered the clouds and Great Lakes departure issued a southerly vector to avoid a cell of weather that overran the airport minutes after we departed. That clearly moved in quickly; it was not an imminent threat while preparing the airplane for flight.

We tracked over a gloomy southeast Michigan, the deep greens and blues of the landscape from two days prior completely sapped of color.

Toledo area and Lake Erie.

Erie International Airport and Presque Isle.

Once we returned to New York, uplinked weather showed that storm cells were beginning to form. Although uplinked weather is not a perfect tool due to its inherent delay, it is nonetheless extremely valuable. It tells us that there is weather in the area, perhaps prompting a query to ATC to understand its position in real time. It also shows us how it is moving so, even if we do not know exactly where it is in the moment, we know where it was most recently and its direction of movement. Whenever possible, I try to conservatively place myself upwind of storm cells.

ForeFlight screenshot after a weather deviation (green line) from our course (magenta line) near Dunkirk, NY.

Buffalo Approach is generally proactive in advising reroutes to avoid weather and this day was no exception. South of Dunkirk, we were given a vector to avoid a small but active cell lurking ahead in the murk. Once turned direct to Sodus, we followed a trajectory along the back side of weather as it  moved away from us.

ForeFlight screenshot demonstrating the lag in radar data. The actual cell was SE of our position.

At times, the delay in radar data was quite evident as we passed through regions depicted with heavy precipitation, but our eyes told us that the weather had moved southeast of our position. A bend in the routing at the Geneseo VOR turned us farther away from the worst of the weather.

ForeFlight screenshot taken while passing Rochester.

When we were roughly 22 miles from Sodus, another cell was dousing our home airport. Animating the radar display suggested that the weather would move off to the east before we arrived and so we continued on.

ForeFlight screenshot showing the weather moving out of Sodus.

This was indeed the case and we arrived home to find a very wet airport awaiting us under a dry sky.

Debrief

In many ways, this trip to Michigan served as a conclusion to my journey there in April, an unplanned fourth chapter appended to the earlier trilogy. It encompassed a return to Flint with Kristy, a final goodbye to my Uncle Brian, a fun evening with old friends, and revisiting another past home for the first time in many years. Beyond that, it was an opportunity for Kristy to pay her respects to a departed high school friend. For all three of us, it was a small reunion with Kristy's siblings and their spouses, all of us residents of different states (and none of them the state of our births). Finally, the return flight home was an exercise in IFR weather management that featured an IMC departure from Flint, 1.4 hours in IMC, and leveraging a combination of ATC, uplinked weather, as well as our own eyes to navigate scattered convective weather safely. By tasking the autopilot with flying the airplane, bandwidth for strategic planning around weather was greatly increased and I made full use of that capability.

For many years, our flights to Michigan were for fun. We visited family and friends while introducing The Bear to aspects of our home state that we loved, places like Kalamazoo and the Air Zoo, the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, and Mackinac Island. Over the years, our trips to Michigan have morphed in tone, driven more by loss than joy. This change in connotation is not something objectively earned by the state. Instead, I think it is more reflective of our stage in life.

"We were talking about whether we would see you," my uncle's eldest son told me at the funeral gathering. "But I knew you'd be here. You always come."

I certainly try. Having a time machine helps, even if using that capability requires additional work and planning than is necessary when simply hopping into the car.