A roundabout route

A frozen-over North Atlantic Ocean, glacier-filled valleys and a surreal stretch across Greenland's ice caps.

Eating whale steak at an arctic outpost, being met by armed soldiers in Croatia and posing for pictures next to the Parthenon.

And one scary moment at 16,000 feet.

These are some of the highlights of Stan Crader's recent trans-Atlantic trip, in which he and a friend flew a twin-engine Cessna 5,500 miles over 15 days, making stops in eight countries.

The trip started on April 25 in Wisconsin and ended in Athens, Greece, by way of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, Holland, Austria and Croatia.

"It was a trip that bordered on an expedition," said Crader, 50, a lifelong recreational pilot who is president of Crader Distributing, a multistate distributor of Stihl chain saws in Marble Hill, Mo.

"We were flying in places other people never fly," Crader said.

Crader, who lives in Jackson, had already made long trips. He'd flown to Florida to visit Stihl's manufacturing facility. He'd made cross-country flights. He even flew along the route taken by Lewis and Clark.

"My wife says I'm not settled," Crader said. "But she knows I'm like an old dog. I always come home."

Had always been on to-do list

So when a new friend he met last year in the Bahamas invited him to fly with him on a trans-Atlantic flight from the United States to Greece, Crader immediately agreed. For Crader, making a transatlantic flight had always been on his pilot's to-do list.

Brian Vonherzen, a computer hardware consultant and fellow pilot from San Jose, Calif., has made the trans-Atlantic trip to Europe three times himself to visit clients and line up new ones. He always brings along another pilot to divide up the flying time and share fuel expenses.

Crader took a commercial flight to Wisconsin and met Vonherzen, who already had his plane stocked with emergency gear and a personal locator beacon.

Both men were excited. Crader wrote about that first day in an essay he hopes to have published in a recreational pilots magazine: "We were about to embark on what I anticipated would be the trip of a lifetime; I would not be disappointed."

The men had a tentative route and an alternate route in case the weather pushed them off course.

The shortest route, of course, is the route commercial airliners take, Crader said. Small planes, however, must plan stops along the way for fuel, something not possible over the shortest route and the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.

Crader and his friend even chose a route that was out-of-the-way for smaller planes. But Crader wanted to see glacial gorges in Canada's Northwest Territory, catch a glimpse of polar bears along the coast of Baffin Island and fly over the Kangerlussuaq mountain range in eastern Greenland.

In other words, Crader wanted an adventure.

That's not what happened, at least not at first.

"The first day was a drag," he said. "We flew above the clouds. All I could see was ... I call it the white room. It's just the top of the clouds. It wasn't what I was hoping."

They flew 1,900 miles that day to Iqaluit -- their flights generally were at altitudes of 15,000 to 19,000 feet -- a small fishing and hunting community in the Canadian province of Nunavut. The town, so far north there were no trees, was mostly covered with snow and ice.

"It was barren," Crader said. "It's an outpost, really, for people to go seal hunting and polar bear hunting and fishing."

They stayed at a small hotel after refueling. The hotel had no Internet connections.

"Nobody there seemed to care about the Internet," Crader said. "Their primary concern was staying warm and not getting eaten by the polar bears."

The two men left at dawn for the 500-mile flight to Illulissat in Greenland. They crossed the peninsula of nearby Baffin Island, flying at low levels through a glacier-filled valley. The Davis Strait was frozen.

Finally, Crader was getting the views he'd been expecting.

"It was beautiful," he said. "It was sensory overload. I couldn't put it into words."

Flying over long stretches of water didn't exactly scare Crader. He said few pilots would admit to being scared anyway.

"No, not scared, but anxious," Crader said. "Especially when in instrument conditions, picking up ice and out of range for communications, except satellite phone, which is cumbersome to operate in flight."

And Crader was never really scared of crashing into the water. He wasn't even particularly worried about crashing on land and freezing in subzero temperatures.

The biggest fear for Crader was polar bears.

"We had ample emergency gear to withstand extreme conditions, so long as we didn't become part of the food chain before help arrived," he said.

Their next stop was Illulissat, a small town north of the Arctic Circle. The town also was blanketed by snow and ice and inhabited by Eskimos and Danes. Nearly every home has a sled parked in the yard along with what Crader called some "ubiquitous husky."

The view that night from their hotel included a bay and icebergs. The hotel also had Internet connections, meaning Crader could communicate with his wife. It was this night that the men enjoyed a whale steak, which Crader said is similar to pork steak. The sun didn't set until midnight. Crader didn't sleep well, but he attributes that more to the meal.

Then came the first setback. They arrived at the airport, met by freezing drizzle that turned into rain.

The weather was too bad. The men were grounded.

For three days, the freezing rains came. Crader spent the time reading books, catching up on e-mails and walking around the town of 500 people. To make matters worse, he caught a stomach bug.

When the two took to the air three days later, Crader was feeling better, glad to be in the sky again. They flew across the Greenland ice cap, which Crader said was "eerie and difficult to describe; angel hair comes to mind."

They zigzagged their way through the peaks before flying out to sea level en route to Iceland.

"It promised to be greener than Greenland," Crader wrote in his essay.

As they approached Iceland they were 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle. "Any minute, you expect to see Santa Claus," he said.

The cockpit was comfortable, though. The plane had a good heater.

And then came that tense moment at 16,000 feet: Nearing Iceland, they picked up a lot of ice on the wings of the plane as they descended through the clouds. Communication was impossible because they were too far from an air-traffic control tower.

"That last hour was stressful," Crader said. "There was a lot of ice and unknown weather conditions. I was happy to be on the ground."

They landed safely in Myvatn, Iceland, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet. The area is officially the divide between Europe and America, Crader said. Beneath the divide are numerous hot-spring pools.

A storm with hurricane-force winds became stationary, extending their stay to 2 1/2 days. They drove a rental car around Myvatn, a site Crader said is similar to Yellowstone. Crader became a bit homesick.

"I called home and listened to the answering machine just to hear my wife's voice," he said.

Finally, the weather moved north, and Denmark Strait was clearing. They departed for Scotland. Iceland to Scotland was their longest over-water leg. They flew 700 miles to Wick, Scotland, in the northernmost part of the country.

"We were glad to finally be on what we considered the mainland," Crader said.

They ate fish and chips at a local pub and stayed at a bed and breakfast.

During the flight from Scotland to Holland, clouds shrouded the United Kingdom. They flew down the North Sea to Lellystadt, arriving on Holland's Liberation Day holiday, the day the Allied Forces liberated Holland from the Germans.

"It was really a good day to be an American in Holland," he said. "It looked like the Fourth of July."

They stopped in Salzburg, Austria, and caught a Mozart concert. The next day, they stopped for fuel in Croatia. "It was one of the most beautiful coasts I've ever seen," Crader said.

But they were greeted by armed soldiers, who were pleasant enough but still made the men nervous.

"They wouldn't let us get more than 20 feet from the plane," Crader said. "I don't know why. They were apologetic. They just kept saying things were messed up."

Finally, after fueling up, they left the troubled republic behind. They arrived at their destination, Athens, 16 days after leaving Wisconsin.

Crader had planned to spend a few days in Greece, but the weather problems had cost them. After a day taking in the sights, Crader took a commercial flight back to the U.S., leaving Vonherzen to his business trip of several months.

Reflecting on his trip, Crader said he was grateful for the opportunity to interact with different cultures and see beautiful scenery. But it also made him appreciate his homeland.

"As the large jet started its slow taxi to the runway," Crader writes in closing his essay, "I sat back, closed my eyes and didn't open them again until we were less than 30 minutes off the U.S. coast."

smoyers@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137

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