The avionics work was finally finished and the plane was ready to go but it wasn’t.  January can usher in strange weather to southern California via the Santa Ana winds and, indeed, 2026 brought some really windy weather.  So I waited to pick up the plane; and I waited and waited and waited until I couldn’t wait any more.  I called Hertz for a one way car rental from Palm Springs to Santa Paula and they were out of cars; the same was true with all the rental car companies.  Nothing was going to be easy about this.

So once again, off I drove in my U-Haul rental truck bound for Santa Paula.  On the trip up to SZP I kept watch on the weather looking for signs that the winds were easing;  some spots were dead calm while others were still blowing up a storm. But when I arrived in Santa Paula the weather was beautiful and despite receiving a warning from flight service about moderate and occasional severe turbulence, off I went.  I wasn’t in the air for five minutes when it began to get bumpy and the plane was kind of doing its own thing but nothing beyond what I would call moderate turbulence.  This would not be so bad after all.

But along about Ontario I ran into some unexpected clouds that appeared at first to be a rather large wall of them.  All stations were reporting VFR weather between me and PSP so I decided to drop down and get below it.  But after dropping about 1000 feet I changed my mind ( I know not why) and decided to climb above it and advised ATC of my intentions; they pretty much told me to do whatever I needed to do but they sounded a little concerned; perhaps I sounded the same.  After hearing several reports from several pilots reporting severe turbulence I advised ATC “I’m at 9500…let’s see what happens”. And it wasn’t too bad.  With the tailwind I picked up going through the Banning Pass, the ground speed really picked up so I was through the worst of it pretty quickly.  The winds were gusting over 30kts at PSP but straight down the runway and I aced the landing; all-in-all it was really a hoot.