Day 3 began with text from my buddy Nino saying "enjoy sewer city" aka Sioux City, Iowa...
and the inevitable life lesson that if you spend enough consecutive hours strapped inside a vintage taildragger with a window rigged shut, your dietary ideals drop straight through the floorboards.
Now this is coming from someone who drives a few hours to natural springs to get “structured water with all the minerals” and generally eats like I’m still living in the Garden of Eden, you know - veggies I grew, bread I baked…certainly not processed crap.
By mid-morning, my primary survival triangle consisted entirely of Glacier Freeze Gatorade, canned oxygen hits straight to the dome like an aging rock star backstage, and Tootsie Rolls I hijacked from the gift bags in the backseat.
They weren’t stuffed into the book tour goody bags by random chance. They weren’t even an impulse 'buy-now' on Amazon Prime.
There is deep, ridiculous, generational lore behind those little brown logs of chewy glory. Somehow, Tootsie Rolls have sneakily inserted themselves into the very fabric of my flying life.
Case in point: Smidgey.
Smidgey is my resident aviator bear who lives clipped to the air conditioning vent in my car. One day, I looked over and was horrified to discover a tiny crime scene: Smidgey’s head was completely gone. Decapitated. Vanished into the ether.
Having just left my mother’s house, I immediately called her in a mild panic.
“Mom, my aviator bear’s head is missing. Did it fall off in your driveway?”
“I don’t know,” she replied with supreme calm. “What am I looking for? How big is it?”
“It’s the size of a Tootsie Roll!” I shouted into the phone.
Without missing a beat, she fired back: “Wait. Like the big log kind, or the small Halloween one?”
“It’s Smidgey-sized!”
“Don't you mean Midgie?” she asked, casually referencing the actual, official brand name for the bite-sized candy.
“Whatever- you know what I mean!" (Insert Teenage Eye Roll).
And just like that, my aviator bear was formally christened Smidgey.
I did find his head, and if you must have one of these adorable little aviator bears, you can find them here.
My whole family official has Smidgeys on their vents.
So naturally, when it came time to name this big, roaring, vintage warbird, the Tootsie Roll curse resurfaced with a vengeance.
Finding the right name for an airplane is a high-stakes emotional minefield. You can’t just christen a piece of living aviation history like a goldfish. The brainstorming session got weird almost immediately.
I circled around literal synonyms for red, tossing out ideas like Crimson, which felt entirely too brooding and self-serious for cross-country flying.
Someone pitched connecting her name to Poptart—which had honest sentimental logic behind it, since Poptart is my other little red airplane. Naming this big girl something cute and sisterly to honor her smaller hangar sibling sounded darling on paper, but looking at that massive radial engine, "darling" felt absurdly out of place.
Then came the other short-list contenders: George (solid, stoic, completely devoid of swagger) - sorry Kevin Quinn
and… yes, Tootsie Roll. On our July maiden voyage home from Long Island New York I stole a Toostie from the FBO and pulled it out somewhere over Dinosaur Monument Utah - I snapped a pic - included here for your viewing pleasure...
The truth reveals itself: she is the exact, unholy shade of a classic Tootsie Roll wrapper. Now you’ve seen it, and you will never unsee it.
Months later, when assembling swag bags for the 7 Primal Wounds tour, dumping a mountain of Tootsie Rolls into the bags felt like the ultimate inside joke—a sweet little nod to a decapitated bear head, a runner-up aircraft name, and the alternate universe where we were flying across the continent in an oversized chocolate chew.
Then my dad sent a text containing exactly one word:
Scarlett.
The moment it flashed across the screen, the entire debate dissolved. That was it. Case closed. Leave Poptart in her own spotlight, bench George (it wasn't a he anyway), and relegate the Tootsie Rolls strictly to the emergency cockpit snack pile.
Because Scarlett didn't just evoke the fierce, sweeping grit of Gone with the Wind.
It went straight to the bone: the iconic story of a woman who was scorned, ridiculed, doubted, and dragged through the mud, yet somehow gathered her skirts, dusted off her boots, and fiercely overcame every single thing the world threw in her path.
They say your airplane becomes an extension of you. You anthropomorphize it, give it human emotions, bleed into its metal, and let its engine set the pace of your own pulse.
Looking at that deep crimson paint out on the tarmac, you could feel it. She wasn't an oversized candy bar. She wasn't a cute little toaster pastry. She had clawed her way through the freezing wilderness of wartime Alaska, survived decades of weather and wear, was left abandoned and alone in a hangar for a decade and was now roaring into the sky with unbroken, defiant elegance.
She was Scarlett. And Scarlett was me.
At the pace I was actively, shamelessly embezzling out of the promotional swag bags I doubted there’d be any left for people who were meeting me at the airports.
We should probably talk about that too… I had 100 advance reader copies of the book, special ordered, they had a custom “flight log” inside the cover and they were sealed with “black box” recorders - AKA trackers.
The idea was I’d fly them around the country, social media would meet me and the book would gain wings and a reputation before it was ever available for sale.
Fun Fact: The books have since traveled internationally, the trackers have lit up telling me they’ve been to Central and South America, and all over Europe.
So while these Goody Bags were full of all sorts of Goodies for the “fans” I am a self-help author and took a bit of my own advice, and put me first… If the readers want emotional enlightenment, they can read the book; the Tootsie Rolls became a tax - and mandatory for my survival.
But alas, I started the morning fresh,
Our first major brush with fame happened in Iowa, rolling up for a TV interview with KOTA in Sioux City.
It was a highlight spending some time with the onsite camera man and famous news anchor. It was also when I realized that the true star of this show is Scarlett.
Scarlett is one of only 25 still actively flying Stinson V77 Reliants, and while Eddie gets all the clout, the truth is, Katherine Stinson was the real winner of the family.
Because my makeup was ON FLEEK for the cameras I made sure I took lots of dewy Shittay Selfay's - you know before my hair got "Radial Grit Spray No. 680."
From there, we banked toward Creve Coeur to meet up with Preston Monoc. Mr. Monoc is a genuinely elite aerial videographer and photographer, meeting him in REAL life after geeking out on his REEL life was a super special highlight of the trip. Preston worked pure optical sorcery, capturing Scarlett’s historic lines against the sky - at the literal hottest and ugliest time of day.
We finally set Scarlett down at gorgeous, historic Bowman Field.
Walking into that iconic, storied World War II terminal building felt like stepping directly onto a vintage movie set, complete with an incredible meal that almost made me forget my 48-hour diet of convenience-store rations.
Sitting outside staring at Scarlett as the sun started to set, surrounded by decades of aviation heritage, the airfield felt timeless, peaceful, and solid.
Of course, life in aviation has a strange, poignant way of marking time.
That quiet stopover would take on a much heavier, haunting meaning down the road when the UPS crash happened there—turning a book tour memory into one of those grounding markers that quietly reminds every pilot of the razor-thin margin between romance and tragedy in the air.
We had a sexy azz bed with a mirror behind it in the ghetto of Kentucky, but alas, I was too tired for any Brown Chicken Brown Cow, so we fluffed the pillows and zonked.
Tomorrow brings more airspace, more runway roulette, and almost certainly more stolen candy.
Until then: buckle up, buttercup.