The weather was very hot, about 91 degrees. There was a convective sigmet (basically big and powerful thunderstorms) about 100 miles to the west. I was a little concerned by it, but felt confident that the weather would be no factor for us.
Crawling around on the hot pavement during pre-flight checking the wheels and the underside of the plane was brutal. I was in a rush to get the plane started so we could have some air movement while we were on the ground.
Even though it was hot the air was surprisingly smooth and pretty hazy. There were scattered clouds about 5,500', so I decided to level off at 3,500 for the first half of the flight. It wasn't as high as I would like to have been, but good enough. We had a great view of Cary and Raleigh on the way up and got some great pictures. I always enjoy flying over familiar places. Here's a picture of Carter-Finley Stadium and the RBC Center.
As we approached IXA there was only one other plane taking off. They headed off in the opposite direction from us so no big deal. We made left traffic for runway 20 and greased the landing. A picture of the final approach to IXA is below.
The FBO was already closed for the night so we just taxied back to the runway and took back off to the southwest back to TTA. The plan was to climb to 4,500' for cruise. About 4,000 I started to notice the apparent lack of visibility, and realized that I was arguably in a VERY thin cloud that really couldn't be seen, but did cause a pretty quick decrease in visibility. I immediately descended back down to 3,500' to avoid going out of VFR conditions.
The flight back was somewhat uneventful. We went back over downtown Raleigh and NC State University just like before and made our way down US-1 to TTA. There were several other planes in the pattern, but we fit right into the left downwind for runway 3 and made another very smooth landing. The ride was pretty much bump free. They call that ego flying because it makes you feel like you're really good (even though I know better).
The photos below are 1) looking south down Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh, 2) NC State's campus, 3) pretty cloud picture, and 4) final approach to runway 3 at TTA.
