my first visit to the Berkeley County Airport

Today I went to the Berkeley County Airport to take a little plane ride with a local pilot so I could take the aerial photo of the corn maze.

For our first four years of operation, our friend and pilot Randy Bales took our photo from his plane. But you may recall that last year during our corn maze season, Randy was hit and killed by an unlicensed driver while riding his motorcycle to work. Sadly, we were forced this year to find someone else.

The corn maze has given me lots of opportunities to do things I would never have done before. Like cold-calling the Berkeley County Airport and explaining what we needed done and asking if they could recommend a pilot who might be interested. And then having to cold-call a pilot and explaining what we needed done and asking him if we could hire him.

Randy always took the photos while piloting his plane, so we just got the end product. The pilot that I contacted said that one of us could go up in the plane and take the photos. Ummm. That's a lot of responsibility that I never realized was on Randy's shoulders. He had to take THE perfect photo, all while piloting a plane 2000 feet in the air!

When I saw Steven and Charlotte this weekend, I told them of the plan and that we needed to draw straws to see who would go up. I was secretly hoping it would be me because I've always wanted to see the corn maze from the air. Charlotte immediately said she was out of the contest because she doesn't do small planes. Steven said he was working and so I won! YEA!

Except that I started wondering how safe this really was. After all, I am the mother of one, hopefully soon-to-be two boys. My husband's in Afghanistan. And my most favorite blogs in the whole world are written by two irreverent but deeply Mormon sisters in Utah, one of whom suffered burns over 85% of her body a year ago in a terrible plane crash. Was this worth it? Our only other choice was Mom, and quite frankly, Mom, you were never really an option because we've seen the photos you've attempted to take in the past.

So I went to the Berkeley County Airport today for our 4:30pm flight. I thought I saw very ominous clouds on the horizon so I commented on this in my most meteorological expert-sounding voice, but the pilot told me it was a beautiful day for flying. Whatever.

And then I looked for a nice big sort of jet-looking plane and only saw these little propeller planes. Where were the bigger-ish planes? You know the ones where you don't have to fold yourself up to get in? The ones that don't look like they require a rubberband to get the prop going?

The fuel man filling up the plane before we took off. Now is not the time to try and save a buck. FILL IT UP!

But what was I going to do? Chicken out?

Funny I should mention chickens because while I was in the airport terminal (and yes, that's what they called it), two men came in in their very official University of South Carolina-logoed gear. I didn't think much of it because my pilot was telling me it was time to go.

We climbed into this little baby and after going through pages of pre-flight safety stuff, we got to the end of taxiing and stopped. I heard all this chatter on my headset but didn't know what any of it meant until the pilot pointed to a plane that was coming in and said that as soon as that plane landed, we'd take off. This is when I realized that I could never be a pilot: I never even saw that plane coming.

So the plane landed and it was a sleek little jet, all black with a big old Gamecock logo painted on the tail. Very cool. Mac would have loved to see that. So I guess these guys were recruiting down here and heaven forbid they have to drive the whole 1.5 hours back to Columbia in a car. You might not know this but we tried to get the rights to do a Clemson-Carolina theme at the corn maze a couple years ago. We had to go through both schools' athletic department attorneys and the collegiate licensing board (or whatever it's called) and they decided we were going to have to pay both universities royalties plus a fee to use their logos. At the time, I thought "this is ridiculous, we're a small family farm just trying to do an interesting and relevant corn maze theme, we've paid lots of money to both these schools for tuition and booster clubs and athletic events, etc." Well today I thought "this is still ridiculous but I understand better why they wanted our relatively paltry bit of money. It takes A LOT of money to fly that sweet little plane around to recruit players."

Back to the flight. So we took off; we headed out to the corn maze; I took photos; he changed elevation and I took more photos; we toured around the lake, the locks, downtown Moncks Corner, the Cane Bay area, etc. It was all very enjoyable and I do believe that everybody should take a flight around their hometown every once in awhile. But I will be the first to tell you that I was glad to get back on terra firma.

Now I just need to figure out how to be a Gamecock recruiter...