Slidel on Autopilot

Took off from Meridian (Key Field) this afternoon with blue skies all around. As with the landing, I took off to the north and then had to turn around to head back south. In this shot, you can see the airport behind me and I-58 directly below. I pretty much followed the Interstate on my way to Slidel, Louisiana, but was also navigating by VOR.

Once airborne, I started messing around with the autopilot. Even on a small plane like this, the autopilot has a lot of features, but for this flight I just focused on one, the Heading Select function. With the autopilot engaged and the Heading Select button pushed in, the plane will steer towards a selected heading. Basically, on the heading indicator (compass which shows you which direction your nose is pointed), there's a little knob that you can twist to spin a heading marker around through all 360 degrees. Where-ever you set that marker, the autopilot will turn to that heading. Once on course, you can make adjustments just by turning the knob and changing the desired heading a degree or two left or right and the plane automatically adjusts to the new heading. Then, all you have to do is maintain altitude and airspeed and let the plane steer itself. Pretty awesome!

My direct flight plan would have kept me mostly in Mississippi, only entering Louisiana right at the tip of the toe, just above Slidel, but I've got MegaScenery for that part of the State and spotted the transition between that and regular scenery as I was flying. I naturally had to change course and check it out. A quick twist of the heading select knob and my plane steered westward:

As you may recall from Florida, the transition from regular boring monotonous scenery to photo-realistic MegaScenery is pretty dramatic.

Right at that corner of Louisiana, there's a river that snakes in from Mississippi. I think it's the Pearl River, but oddly enough, Google Earth doesn't label rivers, so it really takes more research than you'd think to try to identify one.

Anyway, I noticed this odd feature in a bend of the river and took a picture so I could get more info later. It's located at 34 51'57.49N, 98 46'35.47W in Google Earth. There's no info there, but looking up and down river at similar features that were named I deduced that this is an old bend in the river that got by-passed when the main channel jumped its banks and took a short-cut around it. There are a number of little horseshoe lakes like this up and down the river for the same reason.
Further south, I located the Slidel Airport (lower left), with Lake Pontchartrain in the background. The weather was still nice, but I was going to have a bit of a cross-wind on the landing. The runway orients north-south, so from this point I need to fly downwind to the west of the airport and then turn back north to land.
Here I am on final approach. With the new rudder pedals I can actually point my nose into the wind and fly at an angle. It's hard to tell in a still image, but the plane is actually moving straight towards the runway, even though the nose is pointed to the left, towards the hangers.

Landing was great and after my taxi to the parking area I discovered a hidden feature of the Corenado Skylane. If you turn the engine off, turn the batteries off, and put the parking brake on, the airplane graphic changes to include wheel chocks and a pitot tube cover (the little red flag handing under the wing). Pretty neat.