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If someone were to ask you “what were you doing fifty years ago today?”, most of us would probably have a hard time answering that question. Unless it happened to be the day you got married or the day one of your kids was born. Sometimes other events become so meaningful in our lives that they too, stand out, as special moments, even turning points that forever change our life experience. I knew that the 50th Anniversary of one such event was approaching but I needed to look into my Dad’s logbook to confirm the date. That date is tomorrow, Saturday July 18, 1970. It was the day that my Mom, Dad and I climbed aboard Dad’s 1964 C model Mooney, N7106U to not only begin our summer vacation, our first family flying vacation, but to be part of Dad realizing his boyhood dream of one day flying across the country in his very own airplane. This was only the second time since my Dad’s passing that I have looked in his logbooks and I was not prepared for the flood of emotion that would follow. You need to understand that this was more than just a vacation flight. It was more than a trip from California back home to Pennsylvania to attend a family reunion. It was the culmination of nearly four years of constant searching for the right airplane to make his dreams come true. It was also going to be the opportunity for Dad and me to find some of his flying buddies from the 1940s and 1950s and to see if we could find his 1946 J-3 that he ordered brand new from the factory in 1946. And, to make it even more challenging, we had to do all this in just two weeks time, because that is all the vacation time that Dad had. So over the next two weeks, I would like to invite all of you to climb aboard 06U and ride along with my family as we relive that special event from my childhood, just as it occurred so very long ago. I promise there will be adventure, an accident, a pretty girl and a celebrity along the way. Like all true stories there will be some tears and death as well.