The plan always seems to change. Weather and availability has been terrible the past two weeks, and my CFI and I have yet to get our required pre-checkride time in because of it. We DID, however, get 1.4 hours and a mock checkride in last night before the storms rolled in. I need to remember to fly while on the ground, as I didn't turn into the wind or dive away from the wind while taxiing. Also, my first diversion practice was difficult and probably would have went much longer had I not noticed a VOR on the ground. I was having trouble finding on the sectional the bodies of water, roads, and power lines that I saw on the ground. My power-off stalls seemed to nose dive much more than my last few practice sessions and I gained too much speed as i was recovering. Finally, while I enjoyed the unusual attitudes under the foggles I started feeling sick and had to open the little side window on the Cherokee and funnel some air in. That's happened a couple of times now and not sure if it's the heat, bumps, unusual attitudes, anxiety, or all of the above.
As an aside with the approaching storm, we saw it rolling in from the southwest and heard someone talking to ATC saying something like they were around a "huge cell" and needed to get out of there. ATC responded back with something like "I see what you're seeing. It's not that big but looks to be about 8 miles wide." I don't recall the verbatim response from the aircraft but it was something along the lines of "I don't care whether you think it's that big or not, I don't want to be around it and I need to get down."
After we landed the storm was getting closer, and an aircraft at our non-controlled airport made a call for a downwind 29 and then abruptly changed it to a right base for 11 (We are left traffic, but no one was in the vacinity and I'm betting he just wanted to get on the ground).
