I also decided to leave the Dalton area and actually fly somewhere. My sister lives in Huntsville, Alabama, or rather in Madison, which is just west of Huntsville. I decided to simulate a trip to visit her, so I did some checking and found that there is a small airport in Madison. I made that my target and checked Google Earth for some landmarks for navigation. The Baron has a cruising speed around 200 knots, compared to maybe 100-110 for the Skyhawk. It's about a hundred miles from airport to airport and I didn't want to take an hour to get there (although that's how it ended up).
I took off fine and climbed to altitude but notice my cruise speed would not get above 150 knots. Then I remembered that this plane has retractable landing gear, which I had left down since take-off. Somewhere around the Georgia/Alabama line I finally retracted them and made a mental note to put them back down before landing.
Once over Alabama, I spotted the Tennessee River and the Bellefonte nuclear power plant near Scottsboro. Not sure why the nuke plants are modeled in 3D at my display settings when almost nothing else seems to be, but I guess I'll start using them more for navigation. From there I turned slight southward, looking for a branch of the river that would lead me to Hunstville. If you follow that branch northwest, it starts zig-zagging just south of town forming an "M" shape. The eastern hump of the M points towards Huntsville while the western hump points to Madison. I turned north at the second hump and started looking for the airport.
Following that line, I flew over a big airport, Huntsville International, I guess, and then tried to find the Madison airport (Palmer Field). It's a little grass runway, so not easy to find, but I spotted it after circling around a couple of times. The real trick was lining up on it to land. The Beechcraft with full flaps is still running about 120 knots, so you have to go well past the runway and loop back around, but I kept lining up on the wrong north-south road and missing the actually landing strip. I finally got the right line and tried to land, but I was too fast and too high and had to abort. At that point I realized that the grass runway was on the same alignment as the big runways on the other side of the interstate, which are only a bit to the east. Using them to line up by, I was able to get the right line on the small airport far enough out to slow down and descend even before I could see it. I nailed the landing, even remembered to put the landing gear back down, but the runway is so short I rolled off of it into a field before I could get the plane totally stopped.
I'm calling this a successful landing, although I now realize that on "easy" mode, any time you hit the ground pretty much counts as a landing. In reality, I may have landed OK, but there's probably a ditch or fence or something between the end of the runway and where I finally came to a stop. At the very least I would have damaged the airplane. In the future I really need to do more research about my destination airport and make sure I'm flying a plane that can land there.
Assuming optimistically that whatever damaged I caused was easily fixed, my plan for tomorrow night is to try to take off from this runway in the same airplane. Whether I can clear the trees remains to be seen, but if I do, I'll head back to Dalton. Hopefully the flight home won't take as long as this one. I'll remember to put the landing gear up after take-off and shouldn't have to circle the airport a half-dozen times before landing, so that should help.
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