April 17 2010 Flew into Sun N Fun Saturday.  If I could go straight it is 11 minutes from PIE to LAL but due to the Tampa Class B in the middle and MacDil AFB to the south and the fact that I got to get to the other side of Lakeland to fly the Airshow approach it probably took 40 minutes to get there.  Over Lake Parker the controller on the ground wasn't too busy.  I got the "experimental rock your wings" and vigorously rocked em.  Slowed to 100K and had fine spacing on the guy in front of me.  About 1/3 of the way in 3 Cessnas cheat the instructions and cut in, now I'm staring down the tail of a C172 N64137 Craig Gould of Newberry FL (I looked him up) doing all of 80 so I spend the rest of the approach doing aggressive S turns and bitching about Cessnas.  On landing the Controller wanted me to turn Base into the Cessna, which I didn't, then I had a reasonable gap on the Cessna so the controller wanted me to land on the second dot where the Cessna is now so I landed on the first dot and was slowed down by the time I caught the Cessna at the end of 9.  The controller told me twice how good I did (expected him to complain).  I guess he doesn't understand that such a little plane is so fast!  A couple of years ago the Taxi from LAL RWY 9 to the homebuilt parking was like 30 minutes.  I overheated and then shut down.  It was terrible.  This time it was awesome.  I had to stop one time for a flag man that didn't seem to know why he was stopping me but seemed to revel in the fact that he could stop anyone...anyway I got to the HB parking area toot sweet. On pulling into the HB area we got royal treatment from Jerry Marstall and his wife who were working in the Homebuilt area.  Jerry said he'd been waiting all week for the Q200 to arrive!  He and his wife are awesome.  Jerry ran off to host the Q Forum at tent 7 and I tied the Q down for the day. Jerry had 11 people at the Forum.  Informally he went around the tent and found the Q interest of each.  That's me, the good looking rugged guy (hey this is my website) in the straw hat next to Jerry in the green shirt.. Looks like maybe Kevin Sheely out of the West Palm Beach area may be the next Q200 in the air.  Hopefully this year.  He has lots of Pitts time so the Q should be a breeze for him.  He has a beautiful instrument panel designed and may force me to upgrade again!  Between him and Sam there is no end to this!  I guess that Roy (red T-Shirt 2 pix above above) in his Q1 and our Q200 were the only Q's that made the airshow.  In the past there were rows and rows of LongEze, Cozy, Velocity's but this year there were like 5.  There were actually more T18's than canards, which is just weird.  Lots of RV's of course.   I've never been that happy with my Marge Warnkee prop and I found this one for sale... I think it might get me more top end speed but I'll save that for the Q Performance list.....  A couple of highlights for me was seeing the SunShine Clipper again.  I watched this plane(?) getting built and was the first passenger to land on the water with Hank Palmer (a WW11 Hellcat pilot).  It was a cold Feb day in FL and I got soaked!  Still don't regret it.  Hank is like 90 now and no longer flying.  He also built the Green Fokker Triplane at the Reinbeck aerodrone.  It was pretty dusty with high winds for most of the show.  This Saturday was great tho, wind pretty much down RWY9, light breeze, overcast so it didn't get hot.  But dusty. Pretty picture Then the Thunderbirds caped off the show by turning JetA into pure noise and the flight line gates were open. As they were still using RWY 9 which is right next to the HB parking area I know it would be an easy out.  We checked the plane over and pulled the tiedowns out of the ground.  Got in and fired her up.  A ground waving guy had me taxi down the dirty grass and onto the tarmac.  A Pilatus motioned me to pull in front of him.  Nice guy and 2 AT6's were in front of me.  The FAA put the AT6's side by side on the big runway and had me stop so I didn't get behind them for takeoff.  They then had me go to the taxi way which is now RWY 9L and motioned me to take off behind a Cherokee.  I quickly overtook and out climbed that guy but figured there was no way for the Cherokee to get up to me.  About 3 miles later I look back and the Pilatus is gaining on me and out climbing me!  For $5 Mil he aught to but it did take a while for him to catch me. Turning toward home we were welcomed with graying skys and rain.  The 10 minutes of rain we flew thru seemed to do a good job cleaning off the dust but didn't do that well on the bugs. Back home we landed on RWY 27 and taxied back after another successful mission.