Waiting to Depart

Well I was finally ready and was supposed to depart yesterday, but a low pressure system bringing freezing rain, low visibility and low cloud is sweeping across the province leaving me grounded probably until Sunday in Toronto.

Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to get a working fuel transfer pump (for fueling the aircraft out of barrels) together. I had initially thought we had one ready to go in the back of the shop, but it turned out to be more complicated than that. We did have small number of pumps and parts to go with the pumps, but they were all either worn out, the wrong voltage, and/or missing pieces.

Finally we decided to just go buy a new one, and then I spent much of the remainder of the afternoon assembling and making sure I had all the correct fittings and pieces for it. I can proudly say that at the end of the day I did indeed have a working fuel pump with all the correct pieces to fuel an airplane.

Today has been spent killing time. Right across the street from my hotel is an outdoor themed store, which is really fantastic to walk through if you're an outdoorsy person. They have some packages of freeze-dried food by Mountain House made for the purpose of camping/back-packing/survival and the like. The kind where you just add boiling water. We keep several meal packages in our survival kit. I've never had them before, so I decided I'd try a package and see what they're like and if they'd be any good for taking with me on camping trips. They were around $9 per package, which are supposed to serve 2. The "Chicken Teriyaki with Rice" that I tried, contained 580 calories per package, which seems low if you're planning to feed 2 people from it.

I took it back to my hotel room and microwaved the required amount of water to add, poured it in, and let it stand for a few minutes as directed.

It was actually pretty good, relatively speaking. I ate the whole thing, so it definitely couldn't feed 2 grown adults, at least if one or both of those adults was a man. I ate the whole package for lunch and am already starting to feel hungry again only 2 hours later. For a survival food it would be good. Tasty enough to maintain my morale if I was sitting around by a crashed airplane waiting for rescue. As a camping or backpacking ration, its easy and convenient to prepare, isn't heavy and doesn't take up TOO much space, but its not tasty enough that I would use it as a main meal source. I can imagine growing tired of eating them very quickly, so would probably only take enough for perhaps one meal on a "bush style" camping or backpacking trip where space for food was minimal. All in all, its not bad considering its freeze dried food that needs to be re-hydrated - but its still freeze-dried food.