Down to Scottsdale

We recently took the Meridian down to Scottsdale, AZ for both recurrent training and a week's vacation in the sun (there is not a lot of sunshine in Seattle during the winter). Travel distance: 991 nautical miles. Flight time: 4 hours 34 minutes. One hour and 20 minutes of that was in the clouds but that was smooth. About 45 minutes of it was in light chop (minor, bumpy turbulence, sort of like driving on a rough dirt road). If the distance had been 140 miles less we could have made it in one stop but in order to have safe fuel reserves we stopped in Elko, NV to refuel. For this trip we almost exactly matched the time involved in taking a commercial flight direct. My rule of thumb has been that for any flight of 1,000 nm the Meridian and the airlines will take the same amount of time. Anything over that and the airlines win, anything under that and the Meridian wins. The main reason is the massive amounts of ground time involved in flying commerical flights today. Of course that is only for direct flights. If you have a stop over or connecting flight in a commecial flight, or even worse, you can't get a commercial flight to where you want to go, the time goes up dramatically and the Meridian is faster on even longer flights.
The only mechanical problem was that the weather radar stopped working. In discussing this with the avionics repait shop, it is common for a new aircraft to need adjustment of the radar transmitter frequency after things settle in. Of course I still had doppler radar up link, stormscope, the ability to talk with flight watch and air traffic control about storm locations. That combined with the total lack of any thunderstorm activity anywhere near where we were flying made it a total non-issue.
The biggest plus was that our flgiht path took us right over the Grand Canyon. That is an awesome sight.