No Maps Required

So yesterday I talked one of my buddies into doing a low level (which for us is 500 feet off the ground) over western Arkansas. The route started around Nashville and wound its way north over the Ouachitas, right by Camp Ozark, Waldron, and Pilot Mtn. It was one of my favorite flights to date. 500 feet is the height above the average terrain, so when as we approached a ridge we would climb just enough to easily clear it and bank over to get a good look at it, as the "TERRAIN, TERRAIN, PULL UP, PULL UP" annunciators went off. I was bouncin around in the jump seat as giddy as all get out when I recognized the three mountains you can see from mom's front porch. The Pilot/Co-Pilot kept looking at the map saying "well there aren't a lot of distinctive things to look for here" and I was having to hold my tongue from pointing out every little detail. We had to coordinate with some A-10s when they entered the moa, but all went well. We stopped in Fort Smith where mom and dad were waiting, and even though it was very brief, it was really fun to get to fly in for lunch. I flew back on a VFR leg over Rich Mountain in OK to Texarkana which has a very short runway. I ran all the numbers to ensure we could take off out of there, but didn't think about touch-n-go distances. The combination of receiving more fuel then we asked, less fuel burn than I calculated, and higher than expected temps resulted in 100 feet less runway than we needed, luckily we ran the numbers in time and knew to do low approaches only.
I really wanted this flight to happen so we spent over an hour planning on sunday, 3 hours monday morning, and when we stepped to takeoff found out they hadn't actually scheduled a jet for us!!! We almost had to cancel the whole thing, luckily we stole one from a baby class that didn't plan to take off till later in the day. Today rather than putting tons of prior thought & coordination into it we're just gonna show up 2 hours before brief and see what looks good. We'll see how that works.
Another note worthy trip was to Illinois last week, the FBO gave us each $15 dollar vouchers to a nice resturant, and a bottle of local wine out of about a dozen choices, not really what I would think u should give people about to go fly, but...