KBMT Revisited

I'm going to depart a bit from my normal reviews of crew cars and focus on the love of friends and love of BBQ in this post. Please forgive me as I will try and make sure that I give a complete review of the crew car but a thorough examination of the BBQ and the trip. It's not about the destination but the journey.

Saturday June 1, 2019 was, obviously, the first day of June but also a day that 2 guys who have been under a lot of pressure from their jobs needed a day to do "guy" things. That will always include flying to exotic locations for some unknown reason. This flight was no different. The exotic location was Beaumont Texas and the objective (you always have to have an objective) was BBQ.

I was born and raised in Beaumont Texas and thought it was awesome until I started college at Lamar University. Without going into all of the depressive facts of why my childhood was a disaster, let's focus on why this was a good trip. Even in the worst environments, the cream rises to the top. Same thing here. I freely admit that I am a BBQ snob and most of that is because of my relationship with the Patillo family. I've known Robert for more years than I would like to admit. This kind soul was an attendee at my mother's funeral last August and was the one person who surprised me at his presence. I will also let him keep guessing why all of these people keep asking for interviews with him.

We started our day with a text message, early Saturday morning asking if I would like to make a flight for an adventure. I classify all of my flights with Scott as an adventure. I suggested that we fly to KBMT and go for some BBQ. He was good and I even called the FBO and talked to the guy on staff for the day and he was enthusiastic about the crew car (cue: sarcastic response!).

We met at Scott's hangar and were ready to go by 11 AM. We had some challenges along the way. Since we are heading out on a VFR flight plan, that means that we are required to follow all of the rules for VMC. We knew that there were going to be clouds between us and KBMT. We knew that we could climb above the clouds and still remain VFR as long as we could see the ground. There were a lot of clouds between our starting point and ending point and they progressively got thicker.

This is from our way out approximately over Terrell. As you can see, we started with quite a few clouds but it thinned out quickly.

The closer we got to the coast, the more we started to see buildup. Look at the thin line in the distance. The closer we got we realized that we needed to climb to get over. We informed ATC that we wanted to go up 1000 feet and all we got was maintain VFR. 

It was starting to get thicker and we knew we would need to find a hole to get down through.

One nice this we had going for us is that we had my Stratux and Scott's TIS-B traffic so we could see traffic and Scott has XM Weather and my Stratux has ADSB-In weather so we weren't totally in the dark.

About the time we were 50 miles out, we had to look for a home and we found one. Scott had to fly a 360 around a big cloud and then there was a way out. I decided that it might be fun to shoot some video of this.

So we finally get to Beaumont Municipal (KBMT) and Scott put it down very nicely. I just didn't do a good job as a camera man.


Finally! We get to the heart of the blog post, the crew car. I you go back and look at a previous post from here, they had a pretty crappy crew car. I even had to leave a credit card as a deposit because it had a chip key that was worth more than the car. Too many people had forgot to return the key or my theory was that they were trying to save lives by never letting anyone drive it.

Now we have a well equipped ...........................
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Crown Victoria!

This is probably the best Crown Vic that I have ever been it. The A/C worked great, it had power, it had a bumper guard (I was tempted to push something) and was full of gas and clean.  I can't know this car. Of all of the Crown Vics I've been fortunate to drive, this is the cream of the crop. By the way, the FBO is really growing. The young man there told me that they are selling over 3000 gallons of 100LL a week. Compared to what it used to do, that's amazing. Support your local FBO.

We took this creampuff to Patillo's BBQ. If you haven't been to Patillo's, you don't know what you are missing. You have always heard someone describe BBQ as the best thing they've ever eaten. I won't say that but I will say that it will be the most unique taste you'll ever find in a BBQ joint. It is also the oldest black owned BBQ restaurant in the state.

I had a couple of sliced beef sandwiches and Scott had a beef plate. We both had links. They are world famous for the links.

It was now time to head back and the clouds had been building but we still had scattered clouds all the way back to about Terrell. The Dallas area was starting to get cloud cover so we knew we needed to get under for the last part of the trip. We thought we might have to fly circles around the airport but we were able to find a way on top but had to climb to 8500 feet instead of the 6500 we had originally wanted to go. The nice thing about 8500 was that the outside air temp was 63 degrees and smooth.

We fought this for about 90 miles and then while we were checking weather along the route, we started seeing things like clear below 12000 at Athens and even Terrell was looking good. But past Terrell, it started deteriorating. We had to get down before Terrell. So we dropped down to 3500 at Terrell and started making our way to McKinney. As we were listening to ATC, there were several reports of hard rain and it was near Addison and a lot of the inbound traffic for Love Field was being diverted around it. I quit taking pictures as we both needed to be alert and ready for anything.



All in all, a great trip. I really hope you get a chance to go try some of this BBQ. It was worth the trip. I think you can get Scott to agree too!