Grandson Henry's flying day at Hollister!

My 14 yr-old grandson Henry was visiting from Florida for his first trip to California, first time west of AL!  With so many things to see and do in and around my home in Monterey, the aquarium, redwoods, Big Sur coastline, Santa Cruz, etc., Henry's first question was when do we go in the glider?!

First we had to take the covers my club's DG-505, a state-of-the-art, high-performance, composite sailplane:

Henry fits nicely into the front cockpit.  The parachutes are required for aerobatics!  He liked the loop.

"taxiing" to the runway for take-off:

 Enjoying the sights over the hills east of Hollister:

After our hour in the air which included many "thermaling" turns, we landed and got the "grandson/grandfather" picture!

  
Quite different from the picture of me in 1946 in the lap of my bank-attorney grandfather, Stanley Rich:

Lunch at a "real" Mexican eatery in Hollister, Los Cuetas:

Back at the airport, Henry gets to sit in the cockpit of our beautiful Pawnee towplane:

Now Henry was going to fly in our Schweizer SGS 2-32, N87R, for a glider-flying lesson:

We are towed aloft behind another of our towplanes, this one is a Piper Cherokee 235:

After releasing from tow at 4000' over San Juan Bautista, I showed him some tight turns and wing-overs and then talked him through flying back towards the airport with some gentle turns.  I was very pleased to see how he worked out the "feel" of the controls and their relationship to making the aircraft do what he wanted!  It appears he has "The Right Stuff".