Terry Hocking, leader of the Cherokees group, says that the mood of the participants is excellent.

“The mood out here is energized, enthusiastic.” says Hocking. “They’re all saying, ‘what’s our theme gonna be for next year? ‘

“This was our year to meet each other, next year is it’s gonna be ‘second time’s a charm’, or ‘this time we did it right’, or something like that.

“We’ve got a wonderful group of committed people out here.”

The group has made do in Waupaca, their marshalling point for the event.

With lots of good help from Wisconsin locals they’ve found enough places to sleep, and even managed to move their banquet, which was originally planned for the EAA Pavilion, to Waupaca.

“You people are wonderful in Wisconsin,” raves Hocking. Waupaca is outside of their caterer’s normal area, but they agreed to send a small staff out there, which allowed Hocking and his group to have their banquet as planned.

One silver lining of the delay is it gives Cherokees 2 Osh a chance to complete their formation training, which had been delayed due to all the recent bad weather.

So while they’re waiting they are keeping busy with training missions to improve their proficiency in the tricky skill of flying close to other planes.

“We’re still training…We got 12 airplanes up today.”