Last Sunday was a beautiful day here – crisp, dry and sunny. Wim invited me over for a cup of tea and said that as he hadn’t flown for a few weeks and wanted to start and warm up his aircraft’s engine, we could meet up at his piste on the hill over on the other side of Plazac. Wim was waiting in his 4 x 4 on the approach road when I arrived because he thought that the ground further up would be too wet and soft for my car and he was right. Wim’s piste is surrounded by an electric fence because the field that it’s in usually contains cows, but they weren’t there on Sunday and in a few minutes Wim had his little aircraft out and running.

Wim has a single seat Weedhopper which bears a remarkable resemblance to MYRO because apart from having just the one seat that makes it narrower, it is constructed from many of the same parts. And as it has the same engine as MYRO, when it was running and ready to go it looked and sounded very similar too. Because Wim’s piste slopes down slightly at one end, unless the wind is quite strong, he takes off towards the down-hill end and lands in the other direction. Wim decided he’d make a short flight and as the wind was quite light, that’s exactly what he did on Sunday. If you click on the pic below, you’ll be able to see a short video that I took of it, the first I’ve taken of a microlight flight since I’ve been here!

Like my X-Air, Wim’s Weedhopper doesn’t have doors fitted and with what he was wearing at the time, five or ten minutes was enough on Sunday. It didn’t take long after landing to taxi the aircraft off the runway, switch off and push it back into the little hangar, and only a few minutes later we were at Wim’s house eating biscuits and drinking tea. This is what microlighting is all about down here in this part of France and I can’t wait for the time when I am doing exactly the same thing in my X-Air 🙂

Victor, Wim and I went to the airfield at Castillonnes on Saturday as planned. The journey there and back was doubly exciting because we went in Victor’s fantastically restored Citroen 2CV! I left the front seat to Wim because he has longer legs than me and I was bounced around in the back the whole way there and back, but it was a real treat and I wouldn’t have missed it for a moment.

I didn’t take my camera with me so couldn’t take a picture but I’ll make sure I do next time. Victor has done the most incredible job because the car looks as though it’s just left the showroom. It’s finished in the most beautiful shade of turquoise blue and as well as having had a new soft-top made for it in the same colour, it has also had new upholstery fitted in a very attractive matching striped velour fabric. Victor is an engineer so the engine isn’t standard. Performance is limited by the gearbox, which I think is the standard one, but the engine is surprisingly lively and keeps up very easily in normal traffic. I always had the idea that 2CVs are noisy and gutless, but I was only correct in one of those assumptions. Well, for this particular one anyway 😉 And to top it off, it has traditional yellow headlamps, as was apparent as it got dark as we drove home. Lovely 😀

The northerly wind meant that it was quite chilly at Castillonnes. Although the chart shows that name, the signs locally show the airfield as Cavarc. We were the first to arrive and after Victor had mixed 20 litres of 2-stroke fuel, we had begun to get aircraft out of the hangar before others began to arrive. One of the first was Philippe, one of two instructors at Castillonnes. Victor had arranged for an hour or so’s instruction with him and while people were getting things ready to go, I grabbed the opportunity to have a few words with him and show him the email I’d received from Bertrand. There are two training Hurricanes at Castillonnes, one of which has a pod (carenage) and one that doesn’t. I showed a picture of the one that does have in a previous post but to save you searching for it, here it is again.

As you can see, the Hurricane is an open tandem design so you need kit similar to when you fly in a flexwing. This includes the normal helmet, visor and headset and also an insulated flying suit at this time of year. Several hardy souls went off in the non-podded Hurricane but Victor did his instruction (he’s working towards his ULM licence) in the one in the pic. After he’d returned, I was offered the chance to have a few minutes in the front seat (there are controls but no instruments in the rear position), which I jumped at. Philippe was with me in the back but although I can’t say I liked flying with a helmet and visor, possibly partly because the helmet was too big for me and kept dropping forward down my forehead, I was quite happy to take off and climb out although I hadn’t taken the controls before. I then flew straight and level at a height of 250 metres for a few minutes followed by a level 180 degree turn to the right. As we approached the airfield Philippe took over for the circuit and landing which he had to do, because without insurance, it would have been illegal for me to have done so.

After the flight we talked about my situation in more detail. Although I have a current UK medical declaration, the French rules state that I must have a letter from a French doctor indicating that there are no health considerations that would prevent me flying. However, unlike in the UK where I have to get this done at my cost every year on account of my age, once I’ve met the requirement in France, that will be it, for life. As I don’t yet have a French doctor, although I am now registered in the French system, I will have to make the necessary arrangements in the next week or so. Modest FFPLUM licence subscription fees also apply (91.95€ for me) and as these run from the beginning of each year for the following 12 months, we decided that as I must get a doctor’s letter beforehand, we’d start my licence conversion after Christmas in the New Year. Subject to weather, it should be possible to get it done by the end of January, during which time I will have short-term, temporary, membership of the club at Castillonnes.

So that’s it then! There are two doctors in Rouffignac, which is closer to Plazac than Montignac, so all I have to do is give them a call, decide which one to go for and make an appointment to drop in and get the letter I need. That sounds easy enough – now all I have to do is DO IT 😉

Bertrand, from whom I bought the X-Air, is an ULM instructor. A few days after I’d brought it to Plazac he kindly contacted the French authorities on my behalf to get a definitive statement on what I was required to do in order to acquire a French licence. After a follow-up email to spur them into action (this is France, after all ;-)), this is the message that he received back and passed on to me a few days ago.

Il n’y a pas de passerelle pour convertir une licence ULM anglaise en licence ULM française.

Bien cordialement,

This is good news not only for me but for anyone with a UK licence who is thinking about moving to France. What it says is that all you need to do is present yourself to a French ULM instructor and undertake a GST. That’s all, no other formalities, no exams or anything like that. When I compare this to the 100 or so pages of complex gumph that the CAA has produced on the subject of ‘licence allowances’, I find it so refreshing. It’s also great to know that once I’ve done what is asked for, I’ll be free of the tyranny of annual permits and inspections, weighings that the BMAA then uses to beat you over the head with by suggesting that your aircraft that conforms to Section S (and always has done) is over-weight and cannot therefore be flown, the farce of annual medical declarations that many UK doctors refuse to sign despite their being required to do so and having no responsibility for anyway, the mod system that treats you like a numpty and charges you a fortune for the privilege and all of the other paraphernalia tied up with owning and flying a microlight in the UK that allows you to be milked of cash and puts the cost of what could otherwise be a popular leisure activity out of the reach of all but a privileged few.

No wonder there are more microlights and more microlight flyers over on this side of the Channel! We are expecting a bright but cold day tomorrow and Victor, Wim and I are off to the airfield at Castillonnes. Victor hopes to get an hour or so of instruction in and Wim and I will probably just stay on the ground and enjoy the visit. However, I’ll be taking my UK licence and the email I got from Bertrand with me, checking in with an instructor to get some information back from him and maybe making some plans. It could be a big leap forward for me and I’m really looking forward to it 😀

We’ve got northerly winds the same as the UK, part of the same Arctic weather system actually, and it looks as though they’re going to stay with us for a few more days with even a few snow showers possible on Sunday. It’s been too chilly to do much outside today so I’ve been doing the same as everyone in the UK – staying indoors and keeping warm. The layout of the X-Air’s current panel is a complete mess and I’ve been thinking about the layout I’ll adopt for the new one. I’ve now come up with what I think will probably be the final version, although you can never say ‘never’, can you. I’ve done a picture of it, not up to my usual level of quality, I’m afraid, but it’ll do.

Everything is shown to scale and the GPS, Vertex transceiver etc are the actual items. It uses as many as possible of the instruments that are currently in the X-Air with a couple of exceptions. The main one is the airspeed indicator, which is currently a small diameter one showing airspeed in kmh. I have a spare unit of the right size showing mph but much as it pains me to think of stripping it out, I think I’ll use the one from MYRO instead, which is a nicer looking gauge. Although it’s marked up with the AX3’s critical speeds (Vso, Vne etc), the X-Air figures are more or less the same. Anyway, I’ll decide when the time comes, but in any case, I will have to use MYRO’s VSI as the X-Air currently doesn’t have one at all.

I want to position the Vertex and VXBox in the centre of the lower console because both headsets plug in directly and the headset leads are only so-long. The compass (a Silva Type 70) is currently panel mounted and as I do not want to buy a replacement, it will have to go more or less where it is at present, in the centre at the top of the panel. This means that the switches, LEDs and starter button will have to go below it, leaving no space for any other gauges in the centre console.

I want to have my little Satnav/GPS velcroed to the panel in front of me and this more or less dictates how all of the other instruments are laid out. The aircraft currently doesn’t have a fuel pressure gauge and as I think one would be a good idea, I’ve positioned it over on the left of the panel near to the in-line bulb that you use to pump the fuel up to the carbs, and also, incidentally, where MYRO’s one was. This will mean moving the water temperature gauge over to the right of the compass on the main panel and also moving the engine hours gauge even further over to the right, as it’s not an instrument that is needed while in flight.

My Vertex transceiver doesn’t need a power supply because of its long battery life. It’s not an approved radio for use in France, as it wasn’t in the UK either, but this is one of the few areas where the French authorities are more strict and are known to carry out ramp check inspections at larger airfields. Luckily, in the areas where I’ll be flying the most, I’ll not need a radio anyway, most of the time, so all I’ll be doing is plugging the headsets into the VXBox which works as an intercom as well as a voice interface for a camcorder.

Although the Vertex doesn’t need power, the Satnav/GPS does. I’ve therefore earmarked two positions, at the extreme left and right of the panel, where I might fit a suitable cigar lighter socket. Who knows, as I’m no longer subject to the tyrannies of the UK BMAA Mod system, I might even fit one in both positions and use my own common sense to fuse them accordingly to the electrical load permitted by Rotax, without anyone assuming that I’m a complete numpty, need them to tell me what to do and how to do it and then charging me an extortionate amount of money for doing so. Three cheers 🙂

I had a cigar lighter socket and two DIN sockets in MYRO but never used either of the latter. I think I might therefore just fit the one DIN socket, just so I have one, and use the space I’ve earmarked in the pic for panel-mounted fuse holders for the various circuits.

The layout also allows for ‘expansion’ in the future. This would allow a passenger, for example, to have their own GPS in front of them if they wanted, but more importantly, the space on the right will also allow for the additional gauges to be installed. I’m thinking maybe of an exhaust temperature gauge, which although MYRO had one, I’m not thinking about fitting currently as it would need a new exhaust manifold with tappings for the sensors. What would be nice, though, would be that one day I might be able to afford a panel-mounted Mode S transponder and the planned layout leaves plenty of space for that to be dropped in should that situation arise 😉

Oh, and just in case you don’t believe me when I say that the X-Air’s current panel layout is a mess, here’s a pic I took of it the other day…

A few months ago I played around with varying success, stitching together several series of shots taken with my little Pentax camera to make a number of wide or ‘panoramic’ views. They’ve been sitting on my PC hard drive ever since and after I’d cut my grass on Sunday, I decided to have another go at it. The pictures I’ve created aren’t exactly comparable because the shots used in each series have not been taken from the same viewpoints but I thought I’d share them so you can see how much the place has changed over the intervening months. Some of the images are pretty big so ideally you need quite a fast broadband connection, which we don’t have here, to view them. In each case, the most recent image is shown first followed by the comparable picture from June/July.

First, a view from the northern, kitchen, end of the house showing both grassy areas at the front and back.

Now a view back towards the house taken from the north-eastern corner.

And now a view taken from the south-eastern corner.

The next image is of the view over the hills to the east across the field opposite my house.

And finally, this last pic is one that I did for fun. If you can imagine standing where I took the last pic from and turning round to face my house, this is the view that you would see. It is rather distorted as it covers a view of 180 degrees and although there is a slight curve in the road, it doesn’t bend anything near as sharply as this picture might suggest 🙂

The fates were kind to me after all! When I got up this morning and looked out, I was pleasantly surprised to see that although it was dull, there was no sign of rain. So I had a quick breakfast, took the dog around for his morning constitutional and got the mower out. I finished cutting the grass in well under an hour so that’s another job crossed off the list. Now I can concentrate on other priorities – my floor tiles and fireplace and the X-Air 🙂

My garden has changed quite a bit over the months since I’ve been here, not because I’ve made many of my own changes to it up to now, but just because everything I do gets it tidier and more under control. And also because of the changes brought about by each season. When I first saw the house it was mid-Winter and when I came back to sign the papers to buy it, there were heavy snows. I made the move here in the late Spring and then saw the Dordogne turn lush and green in the following weeks. Then the Summer drought took hold and everything became dark green and brown. Now although my lime tree has lost all its leaves, most of the trees around here are still clothed in oranges and gold and so the cycle continues as we head towards Winter again. As you can see below, at this stage of the game I think that the best I can say for my place is that it’s ‘tidy enough for now’.

Although the forecast drizzle has not materialised, earlier I did feel a few light spots of rain on my face. I bumped into my neighbour who’d been out gathering mushrooms and chestnuts in the woods behind our houses but he said that there’s hardly any crop now compared to a few weeks ago, another sign that Winter is just around the corner. But Benjamin and Aurelie’s cat, Scratchy, wasn’t too concerned about that. He has known Toddie right from when he was a tiny kitten and knows that he won’t do him any harm, so he came across to us and started to hunt in the flower bed under my bedroom window. After creeping forward and then standing motionless for ages, he suddenly leaped forward, flicked his paw and tossed a little mouse up in the air! But he didn’t harm it as far as I could see and it hid under a clump of greenery. Scratchy then turned his attention to a hole in the ground where the mice probably live and began digging down and shoving his paws in to try to winkle out his prey.

Toddie and I left him to it and went indoors with me looking forward to a hot shower and lunch and Toddie just looking forward to… lunch. And so life goes on here in the Dordogne 🙂

If only I’d started sooner! One of my old schoolmasters used to offer wise advice whenever he saw someone wasting time and putting off what they should be doing. ‘Procrastination is the thief of time!’ he’d say, occasionally bonking you over the head at the same time with the book that you should have been using to do your work. He’d never have got away with it nowadays, he’d have been up for assault with huge damages awarded against him, but he was absolutely right, of course. And today was a classic case in point. I’ve mentioned several times recently that I wanted to get my grass cut for the last time this year but it’s been too wet even when it hasn’t been raining to think about getting the mower out. But today was different. The forecast hadn’t been that bright but even when I got up and felt the grass outside the back door of my ‘sejour’, it was dryer than it had been for many-a-day recently and was only likely to get better. But as usual on a Saturday morning, I fiddled around, read emails, made a couple of phone calls, caught up with the forums and drank more tea. And then it was time for lunch.

Afterwards I had the idea of cutting my grass in the back of my mind but thought it would be a better idea at that moment to take my rubbish and recycling up to the ‘poubelles’ just up the road. We don’t have household rubbish collections down here. Instead here and there where there are houses we have rubbish collection stations in the form of large commercial size plastic bins at the side of the road. After collecting our waste at home, where if we’re responsible we keep rubbish, recyclables and glass separate, whenever we choose, we just pop them in the back of the car (my estate is perfect, of course), drive to the bins and drop them in. It’s a good idea because the local council only have to visit each waste station rather than every house, thus keeping the cost of rubbish collection down. But I digress – see, it’s so easy to, isn’t it! When I drove down to the bins my car temperature gauge indicated a reading of 17.5 deg C and even I could see that I just couldn’t let such a glorious day go to waste. But by that time it was well past 2.00pm and sunset down here was at 5.18pm today, so I needed to get my skates on 😐

I got cracking with a vengeance and as I got the grass down at the back where the X-Air has been patiently waiting for me to do the work on it that I need to do and for which I have had the parts for several weeks, I could have kicked myself for leaving it to so late in the day. Pretty soon I was down to a tee shirt and after a short delay while I had to un-stick the choke cable when I had to restart the mower engine, eventually I was standing back admiring the back grass (I can’t call it a lawn, it’s just too tatty…) which was down to the lowest it had ever been. Then it was the turn of the front. The lime tree has by now shed all of its leaves and apart from filling my front gutter, there are what looks like tons of the damn things on the ground beneath it. I’d already picked up all of the old wood that I could find nestling in the grass since although the mower seems to deal with it without causing itself any harm, the crashes and bangs it makes in the process make you wince a bit, so I got going without any break as I thought that if I stopped, I might not start again.

I ploughed up and down the lawn for what seemed like ages with grass and mulched leaves flying in a trail behind me, but I could sense that the afternoon was drawing to a close. Quite frankly, I felt knackered by this time, but I still kept ploughing on out of breath and with back, arms and legs beginning to feel the strain. At one time I thought I might stop for a rest and a cool drink but still I refused to give in as I knew I’d never be able to start again afterwards. Then I thought that the fuel had to run out some time soon, so I’d call it a day when it did. But it didn’t, so still I carried on. By this time I was beginning to really feel it. Not that long ago I had a really thorough medical including lots of heart tests including some pretty gruelling treadmill work so I was pretty sure that although I was pushing myself, I was unlikely to come to any harm on that score. Seriously, you have to think about these things when you reach a certain age, and up and down I went.

Well, you’ve probably guessed how it all ended. With the light fading and just the last bit of lawn left, the mower engine sputtered to a halt. There was no way that I’d have had enough time to fill up, restart the engine and finish off, so that’s how things have ended up. I would imagine that the lovely warm day that we enjoyed today was the result of a warm front passing through, and we all know what follows a warm front, don’t we. Rain. If I’m lucky and the front is weak and slow-moving, I might have just enough time to finish the front lawn off tomorrow. But I doubt it, because the local forecast is for light rain to start in the early hours tonight and to continue on and off all day tomorrow. So my old schoolmaster has been proven right yet again. The wisdom of ages – if only I hadn’t procrastinated I’d have got the job done and dusted when the time was right, and I don’t think that keeping my fingers crossed is going to help me finish it off now 🙁

I started the week by setting out a few plans for what I needed to do. One of them was getting my satellite TV system working and I managed to do that straight away. The trouble was that after buying a TV and connecting it up, I then proceeded to waste a day (alright, two really…) just sitting in front of it flicking through the available channels and watching anything that caught my interest. So I thought I’d better get my act together as there are other things I need to sort out. For example, I need to cut my grass for the last time this year. Also the X-Air has been sitting in my garden for some time and I’ve had the bits I need to do the jobs on it that I want to for several days. I also need to buy some floor tiles that match as closely as possible the ones I already have in my house and yesterday that was the job I thought I’d tackle.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently I saw some tiles that might be suitable on the Internet. But the only way I could be sure would be to see them for myself – and that meant driving about 500 kms (approx 300 miles) each way to the warehouse in Caissargues just south of Nimes. I left yesterday a bit later than I wanted to at about 10.00am after plugging the journey details into my satnav which I’ve found to be the best way of finding my way around France, especially on longer journeys. I didn’t even own an up-to-date French map until yesterday. Due to mountains and things, often there is no direct route from A to B in France and yesterday was a case in point. Although I wanted to go in a south-easterly direction, I had to start by heading south towards the Mediterranaean and Spain. After just under an hour I arrived at my first ‘gare de payage’ (toll road station) and as my car is right-hand-drive, I usually get out to get the ticket from the machine. Yesterday because I had an impatient lady driver right up behind me, I decided to open my passenger window and lean right across the car. In doing so I not only broke my satnav power lead but as I found out later, also the car cigarette lighter socket that I use to power it.

This was a disaster – what to do! I knew roughly where I was but still had hundreds of kms to go. I reasoned that if I bought a map and switched my satnav off, I could then switch it on again when I was close to the end of the journey and use the power it still retained to find my destination. After all, we used to do that all the time before satnavs without any help from electronic gizmos of any sort!

And I got away with it! My route (now unplanned) took me in a giant sweeping arc all the way down past (not through as in the old days) Toulouse, Carcassonne (the magnificent mediaeval walled city), Narbonne, Montauban and Montpellier before arriving at Nimes. On the way I spotted the old names, Aigues Mortes, Sete etc, that I last saw when we were on our last family holiday down there in 1986 – 26 years ago. It made me feel very nostalgic.

I found a petrol station after leaving the ‘peage’ at Nimes and asked a young guy who was filling up his car next to mine if he knew where the tile warehouse was. It turned out it that was just up the road! Unfortunately the trip was wasted in that respect because lovely though the tiles they had were (and also the people selling them amazingly kind and helpful), they did not match mine closely enough. Then it came time to think about the trip home. I thought I’d try what looked to be a more direct ‘cross country’ route that would take me north from Montpellier via Millau to Rodez and thence the Dordogne. And Millau, of course, is world-famous for its stunning viaduct – designed by a British architect – that spans between two hills about 900 feet above the ground.

The drive out of Montpellier was something of a nightmare in what was the worst traffic jam I’ve been in since leaving the UK. And French drivers give no allowances for not knowing which exit you need from roundabouts and are quick to lean on their horns if you hesitate for a moment and inconvenience them in their dash from work to home! After a drive north on mainly good, fast roads, I arrived at the ‘Viaduc Millau’. Unfortunately when I drove across it, it was dark so all I could see by my headlights were the supports that towered above the roadway and the barriers at the side and the centre of the road. But fantastically, spread out on the ground below were the lights of the town as though you were in an aircraft flying over them. An amazing experience – one that I must do in daylight some time.

French roads have come on amazingly since we used to come on holiday all those years ago. The motorways are very smooth and modern with speed limits of either 110 kmh (70 mph) or 130 kmh (83 mph). Much of the route I took home was motorway standard even as it climbed higher and higher into the mountains, not much of which I could see unfortunately. When it became particularly bendy either going up or down, then the speed limit was reduced to as low as 90 kmh or even 70 kmh but on the whole you could be speeding along at 110 kmh in what I am sure would have been stunning scenery in the daylight.

Toddie and I, for I had to take him with me of course, got home some time after midnight, so it was a long day. He crashed out straight away and was still taking it easy and sleeping as I began to type this this morning. Not surprising as he’s an old boy now – a bit like myself, although I was just being a bit lazy and choosing not to do the things I really should have been doing today 😉

And, yes, I’m as surprised as anyone! Yesterday I finished running my satellite cable through the roof of my ‘grenier’, down the side of the chimney up there and through the floor into the corner of my ‘sejour’ where I wanted to have my television. In the process, while descending the outside wooden staircase, the bottom two stairs that were obviously a bit rotten, collapsed, so I already have another job lined up 😐 At the end of it all, I faced a classical dilemma. I’m already well up on my monthly budget having laid out a wad of cash on the X-Air bits I recently purchased but I would have no idea whether all the work I’d done installing the satellite system was worth it or not unless I connected something to it.

I thought about buying an inexpensive tuner card for my PC on Ebay to test it with but couldn’t see the point of doing that because I didn’t really want it. It would be a waste of money, and it would have taken several days to be delivered anyway, so I rejected the idea. All the while I had a little green devil on my shoulder reminding me about the gorgeous 42″ Panasonic LED TV that I’d seen on Promo at Boulanger on Saturday but I kept telling him to buzz off. Until about 5.30pm that was. In the meantime I’d checked the TV out again on the Boulanger web site and been impressed yet again by it’s specification compared to other similar models at around the same price (OK, OK, just a little less maybe…) at Leclerc and elsewhere and also noticed that the ‘magasin Boulanger’ at Trelissac stays open until 7.30pm. In the end the little green devil got the best of me. He reasoned that, what the heck, you only live once… so Toddie and I found ourselves shortly thereafter heading off in the car with destination Trelissac. With the day almost over, there was hardly anyone else in the shop and the young chap who served me was a bit bowled over by how easy it was to make such a hefty sale! A few minutes later he and I were loading the TV into the back of my car – together with the complementary pen and plastic shopping bag so generously provided by Boulanger 🙂

Now, if I was to pretend that it was plain sailing getting the system connected up and working, I’d be telling a little fib. I tried to use the set up instructions that came with the TV but kept ending up with the ‘no signal detected’ message. I disconnected my mum’s old Freesat box and tested the signal it was receiving using my precision Chinese satellite signal detector and was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a signal down at the TV end – a bit lower than up at the dish, but that wasn’t surprising as now there were about 30 metres of cable in between. But with the blue light glowing on the Freesat box and the TV connected, I just couldn’t get anything on the TV at all. I then realised that I’d used an accessory lead to connect the SCART from the Freesat to the AV1 port on the TV, but after changing the setting on the TV and several more minutes of fiddling, still nothing. I then decided that it was time to give up and pressed the button with the blue light on the Freesat box to switch it off. When I did so I immediately got a fantastic picture with sound of the Federer – Djokovic tennis final at the O2 in London! Obviously the blue light showed the box was on standby and the light goes out when it’s switched on. How stupid for the instruction booklet that came with the Freesat box, that I have, not to mention such an obvious thing 😐

When I got into the Freesat box system menu, I was pleasantly surprised to find that against a minimum acceptable signal strength of 50% my system was showing a reading of 75%. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert as a result of this – I think that the web site I found that shows you where to point your dish to find your chosen satellite has to take the most credit – but I am nevertheless very happy with what I’ve managed to achieve with kit that I originally bought for use in the UK and which some people told me not to bother wasting my time carting all the way down through France. I still have a lot of exploring to do with the system, but I now have a brilliant TV system with all of the free-to-air UK satellite stations. As Sky uses the same satellite(s), I now also have the option of adding a Sky subscription service in the future since although Sky are not supposed to provide a service outside of the UK, they turn a blind eye to the many thousands of ex-pats all over Europe (the world?) who have systems set up to receive it. But anyway, at least I’ve managed to tick one of my to-do boxes for this week 😉

It looks as though we have a great week coming up – the weather forecast is totally rain-free with some chilly nights (hurray, will kill all those mozzies off!), low wind speeds and temperatures around 20 deg C (nearly 70 deg F) in the latter half of the week. My first job will be to finish off my satellite installation and I might drive the 250 miles each way later in the week to get my floor tiles. But what I would really like to do is make a proper start on the X-Air – fit the new trim and brake cables and front wheel bearings and start on the new panel. With those done it won’t need very much to get it back together again and flyable. Then I must chase up the guys in the French CAA about getting my French licence. Oh yeah – and while it’s dry, I must give my grass a final cut as well. There always has to be a ‘downer’, doesn’t there 😐

Look, this satellite stuff is all new to me. When I bought my installation kit on Ebay months and months ago I also acquired a second-hand ‘satellite signal detector’. To be honest, it was more in hope than expectation because when you receive this kind of stuff that you’ve found on Ebay, half of the time it doesn’t work. And not only had this been left in my garage in the UK for many months, it had also then been dumped in a box with a load of other stuff and subjected to a trek across half of Europe. So I hardly expected to get much out of it.

It looks like a bit of 1930’s laboratory kit, but can’t be of course, because satellites haven’t been around that long. And the rather amusing Chinese-English in the accompanying 4-page, ie a single sheet of paper with a fold down the middle :-), ‘user manual’ also gave the lie to that. But it said quite emphatically that all you had to do was roughly line up your dish with your chosen satellite, if necessary using the compass provided (that’s a laugh for a start as it’s only 1″ in diameter!), connect the signal detector, waggle the dish from side to side and up and down and tweak the sensitivity knob on the unit until you got your signal. Sounded easy enough, even though I’d be stuck up a ladder while doing it and holding the signal detector in one hand, its battery pack in the other and waggling the dish with another. Eh?

Amazingly enough, guided by the green line on Google Earth as shown in my previous posting, it didn’t take me very long to get a signal and after adjusting the sensitivity knob and waggling the dish in the manner prescribed by my Chinese advisers, I tightened the nuts on the dish bracket and descended the ladder with a look of quiet confidence on my face which, sadly, nobody could see as I was alone. Except for Toddie that is, and he by this time was thinking more about his lunch-to-come than anything to do with satellites or satellite dishes. And I must admit, I was a bit suspicious of how easy it had all been – too easy if you get my drift. So after Toddie and I had grabbed something to eat to keep us going, I went across to the corner of my neighbour’s out-house over which the green line was supposed to pass on its 38000 kilometre journey to the Astra satellite and looked back. My face fell. It was obvious that the dish had got a signal from somewhere, but it certainly wasn’t from Astra and if I had connected my box up to it, who knows what TV stations I might have picked up! The dish was directed much too far south and I had obviously been far too over-confident in my new-found satellite detecting skills 🙁

I came back indoors and fired up my computer to see if I could get some kind of clue to what was going on. Surely there couldn’t be that many satellites in that direction… Er, yes there are. The web site had listed them in clockwise order going from east to west and if I wasn’t mistaken, it appeared that I had managed to lock onto Eutelsat Hot Bird 13A. This, according to the blurb I unearthed by doing a Google search, carries more than 500 free-to-air TV stations but hardly any of them in English. So, back to the drawing board, or more correctly the satellite dish. If I’d managed to get my dish so closely aligned in the beginning, using the corner of my neighbour’s out-house, how come I’d not managed to pick up Astra when I did my dish-waggling? The answer was in the sensitivity knob. The lesson in all this is believe your web site, it’s there to help you and to ‘Trust Your Green Line!’ After I’d slackened all the nuts again, re-aligned my dish, connected my signal detector and turned my sensitivity knob, BINGO, there was my signal. Remember, we’re dealing with digital stuff here, none of your old-fashioned analogue nonsense, so you either have it or you don’t. And I had it. I then began to carefully reduce my signal detector’s sensitivity in the manner instructed by my Chinese experts who had crafted this superb piece of precision kit, while simultaneously waggling my dish to pick it up again until the kit and I had attained our limits. Then I knew that the job had been well and truly done 😉

Obviously, I won’t know that that’s the case until (a) I connect my mum’s old Freesat box to it and (b) buy a TV and hook that up to the box, but I’m quietly confident. You know what they say, if it looks right, it probably is, and I reckon I’ve got it on the button.

The rest of the afternoon was a bit of an anti-climax in comparison to the technical dramas I had triumphed over earlier on. Toddie more or less lost interest and kept reminding me that it was getting close to his dinner time (it wasn’t, but he does that whenever he’s bored with proceedings) while I ran satellite cable from my newly-illuminated ‘grenier’ along under the eaves of the house to the dish. The highlight of the afternoon was when I heard the unmistakable sound of a Rotax 503 two-stroke engine approaching my house from far off at low level and Wim flew over giving me a cheery wave from the cockpit of his single-seat AX3. It was a perfect day to be flying – bright, sunny and almost windless – and he reminded me of what I’m missing while the X-Air is parked covered up in my back garden and I am busying myself with all these other jobs. They have to be done, but I’d rather be flying… 😕

Yesterday was a good, positive day and I was pleased with how things moved forward a little bit more with the satellite dish and stuff. But that wasn’t all. There was something else that also brought a smile to my face that I forgot to mention in last night’s long post. I sent Rand-Kar a list of items that I needed prices for for the X-Air several days ago and ordered what I need just now earlier in the week. I was on the phone in the morning when there was a knock on my back door. It was ‘la Facteuse’ with a parcel, so I’ve now got what I need to start putting the X-Air back together again. It doesn’t look like much as you can see in the pic below but now I can really start to move forward again on the microlight front. This is more like it 🙂

The package contained the new wing tensioning cables, new brake and trim cables and new bearings for the front wheel. And although I could have made do with the original, I also ordered a new panel front. The current instrument layout is a bit of a mess and although the new front has cost just over £70, not only will it give me great pleasure to make a new panel but I think it will also greatly improve the appearance and ‘feel’ of the aircraft. Anyway, we’ll have to wait and see. And now I must get back up my ladder to see if I can align my satellite dish and pick up a signal 😉

Update at 5.30pm local time – I’m back and typing this while enjoying a refreshing glass of Pelforth Brune, a brown beer that’s quite similar to a British brown ale but which develops a head in the glass that’s a bit like a Guinness but not quite as thick. Well, I didn’t get the satellite dish installation finished off. I got very little done on it at all actually, although I did line it up according to the web site pic in the previous post by standing at the corner of my neighbour’s out-house and adjusting it until I was looking straight down the LNB boom. But that’s all, and I’ve just put the ladder, which has been standing up against the wall all day, back in my cave. The reason was that I have a satellite signal detector that takes 10 AA batteries and although I started charging the first batch of 4 yesterday evening, I had to finish the second and third batches today. Unbelievably, the third batch is still not fully charged and as a result I’ve been unable to use the meter!

But the day has been far from a dead loss! When I run the satellite cable, it’ll need to go through the floor of my attic, or ‘grenier’ into my lounge above where I wish to have my television. That’s fine as far as it goes, but my grenier is not only filthy and containing loads of junk that the previous occupant of the house left behind, but there was also no light up there so you could see what you were doing. I planned to use a cable that was formerly used for an outside light near my kitchen door as I mentioned in a previous post, for a light in the grenier worked from a switch in my kitchen, so I decided that today was as good a day as any to get the job done. And the job turned out well, as you can see below.

Having a light up there will be great anyway, for when whoever I get in does the work on the roof. But now I’ll also be able to think about getting the place cleared out, which will be an excellent thing in itself. And as an aside, what a great space it is, isn’t it. One day I hope to be able to afford to have a couple of extra rooms up there including a new bedroom with an en-suite for myself. After all, after all the work I’ll have done on the place, I’ll deserve a little bit of luxury I reckon … 😉

We’ve had an extended period of rather bad weather, at least I think so. As of today I’ve had the X-Air for 4 weeks and in the whole of that time it has hardly stopped raining – a succession of horrible grey, damp days, one after another. The Dordogne has a speciality – not drizzle and not proper rain. It’s like spitting but quicker, just slowly and gently pitter-pattering down and it manages to keep doing it all day long, non-stop. Just enough to make you not want to go and do anything outside, but luckily I’ve found enough things to do indoors to keep me occupied.

The weather’s really strange (for me anyway) at the moment. We’ve still been getting daytime temperatures of around 60 deg F which means that the bugs aren’t dying off. When we used to come to France on holidays as a family, everyone else used to get bitten by the mozzies except me. But this time around I’m being eaten alive and it seems I’m not the only one. I went to the supermarket the other day and thought that I’d pick up a couple of cans of spray so I could give the whole house a couple of good blasts. It turned out that they were sold out – not a can of spray for ‘volants’ of any brand on the shelf, so I got one of those little electrical plug in ones with a bottle on it, like room freshener but with ‘anti-moustique’ in it. Now I’ll have to see if it works but the signs are good as I keep seeing dead mozzies and midges around the place and I don’t seem to be suffering the way I was! I’ve put some lights up on the front of the house because it’s pitch black here otherwise and when I went to take the dog out last thing the other evening there were literally dozens of mozzies and midges around it and some really big ones too. No wonder I’m covered in bites 😕

So for the whole of the last 4 weeks, the X-Air has stood pathetically under covers in my back garden, being constantly rained on. This was it the other morning seen from the back door of my ‘sejour’ but the picture has hardly changed in all that time.

By the way, the corrugated iron you can see behind the trees in the background isn’t because there’s a scrap yard behind my house. It belongs to my neighbour and as is the normal practice here, it covers an enormous stack of logs, all about a metre long, that need to be kept dry ready for use when needed in their wood-burner. Everywhere you drive here there are stacks of sawn wood by the roadside, some of which has been there for many months while it dries out. But nobody would ever think of pinching any of it though 🙂

Yes, that’s MYRO under the cover behind the X-Air. Previously its wings were lying on the ground under a cover behind it but with all the rain we’ve had, I found that the cover was collecting pools of smelly stagnant water full of decaying leaves. There was a gap in the rain that was long enough for me to move them in so they are now standing covered up against the rear wall of my house. I have various future options for MYRO which I want to retain so I don’t want it to deteriorate in the meantime, so this is a much better arrangement. I also need to refit the cabin doors to stop muck getting inside, which is happening at the moment but I didn’t have time after moving the wings before the rain started again.

The weather is changing, of course, as we go through into the Autumn and start to approach the Winter. The night-before-last was very cold and although I’ve seen a bit of ground-frost a couple of times when I’ve looked out in the early morning, yesterday was the first time that I’ve seen ice on the bird-bath. The day continued a bit on the chilly side but was bright and clear and I had the pleasure of having Sophie and Wim drop in for a cup of tea while they were out walking in the afternoon. I expected another cold night last night and put a heater in my bedroom and also left a bit of heating on in the rest of the house but in fact it wasn’t anywhere near as cold as the night before.

Today was a glorious warm, still sunny day which I made the most of. When my mother left her bungalow to live with my sister, she gave me her Freesat box and while I was living in Kent I bought a satellite dish and installation kit that I never got around to installing. Luckily I bought a dish that was larger than was strictly necessary for the south of England, so when I moved here I brought it with me. My original plan was to have the dish mounted on my chimney, but now my roof work has been put back while I see about getting my fireplace and flue ready for a wood-burner, Wim suggested that I could mount it on a pole in my garden. The problem with that, though, is that my neighbour has some large trees in his garden and although there’s a gap in them in the direction in which I need to point the satellite, there’s actually no suitable spot to position the pole on that line. So I thought to heck with it, why not just mount the dish on the southern end of the house and be done with it, as although I’ve been watching a bit of TV on my computer (not an edifying experience because the Internet here is just so slow :-() I’d like to have satellite TV before the Winter evenings set in.

So today I thought I’d give it a go. I’ve been waiting for a ladder that I wanted to buy to arrive in stock at Brico Depot and at last I got hold of one, so today I went up it and fixed the dish on the wall. It’s a while since I’ve been up a ladder like that, let alone while drilling holes into a stone wall, but pretty soon I got used to it and got the bracket and dish up there. I didn’t take a pic as I couldn’t get the whole job finished before the end of the day, but here’s a screen shot taken from the really handy web site I found that tells you which way to point your dish so it finds your chosen satellite. Where I’ve mounted the dish, I’m hoping that I’ll be aiming it right through the gap in my neighbour’s trees 🙂

I may or may not be successful in getting the system to work, I’ll have to wait and see, but I’m giving it a shot anyway. If it doesn’t work I can soon get someone in locally to install a system for me, but I’ve decided that I’m going to get my satellite TV before the Winter one way or another.

Now what about my floor tiles? The sample arrived from Toulouse and as expected, as you can see from the following pic in which I’ve placed it on top of an existing tile, it isn’t quite close enough to the existing ones.

The tiles from Toulouse are all in that same colour. It’s quite close to the ‘average’ colour of the existing floor, but the whole point is that the floor is made from traditional old tiles that are highly variable in colour. This means that an area done with ‘new’ tiles would stand out rather oddly. Wim suggested that in that case I should do the job in a completely different way, by using bricks on edge, for example, in order to create a feature in front of the fireplace. I’m not that keen on the idea and although doing a ‘matching’ job will depend on finding tiles that blend in perfectly, I think I may have found exactly what I need. A few days ago, Sophie suggested doing an Internet search using the term ‘tomettes’, the old French word for floor tiles. When I entered it into Google, several suppliers that I hadn’t found before came up, including one with the following image on their web site.

That looks pretty dam’ close to my floor to me! The tiles in question are 50% more expensive than the ones from Toulouse but so what – the job only has to be done the once. The main problem is that the supplier is a long way away, over to the north of the Riviera, and I really need to see the tiles for myself before I buy them. But I don’t have anything else more important to do with my time, do I. Life’s such an adventure these days 😀

I was never much of a fan of wine boxes. Many years ago I used to work in the wine trade and although far from being an ‘expert’ (although I do have a diploma…), I have always enjoyed a good bottle of wine. All colours and types and from all countries. Like many others of my generation, the whole idea of putting wine in ‘boxes’ horrified me and I’ve always associated the practice with cheap plonk that you only drink at parties because that’s all there is 😕

I can’t remember the last time I actually bought a wine box before coming to France and it’s possible that maybe I never have. But since I came here, my thinking has changed a bit. My local supermarket stocks some very good wines of all types and many of them for not a lot of money and enjoying them, in moderation, with my meals or even just sitting out in my garden has been one of my great pleasures. But up until recently, I’ve always bought my wine in bottles. Some friends have said that I should start to buy boxes because it’s much cheaper, the wine lasts for four or five weeks and it’s just as good as the stuff in bottles but being a bit of a stubborn SOB, I found it difficult to overcome my ingrained prejudices. And what a twerp I was!

Now, I don’t know what’s been going on with wine boxes in the UK but when I looked on the shelves over here, sure enough I found that the same wines that I’ve been enjoying in bottles are also being stocked in wine boxes. So I started with a couple of reds, a Merlot and a local Bergerac rouge, both beautifully labelled and presented in their boxes, and very good they both turned out to be. Yup, just the same as when I’d bought them in glass bottles! I shared them with some friends and since then, they’ve been standing next to each other on a ledge in my kitchen and I still find it great just to be able to pour myself a glass of whichever of the two I happen to choose with whatever I happen to be eating at the time.

Well, today I came to the end of my first French wine box. It happened to be a 3 litre box of Cabernet d’Anjou which I’ve had for the past few weeks in my fridge, see below.

I’ve enjoyed it with salads, many other light meals and very often just by itself, but today I found one of the best things about wine boxes. I knew that the wine inside was coming to an end when I poured myself out a glass to drink with tonight’s meal but when the glass was full, there was still some left in the box. So I drank a bit and topped up the glass again, but there was still a bit left. So I drank a bit more and filled my glass up again… and again… and again! Before I knew it, I’d drunk a couple of glasses before the box was eventually empty, so there you have it. I don’t need to make excuses because I live alone and don’t have to explain anything to anyone, but to those unfortunates who do, here’s a way to get a few glasses down your neck without anyone noticing – just say that you’re having to finish off the old ‘dregs’ before you open the next box for your friends 🙂

I knew that the moment was approaching, of course, so as you can see in the pic, I’d already prepared myself by buying a 5 litre box of Pays d’Herault, a lovely crisp, semi-dry, 11.5% rose wine. It’s gorgeous and it cost the princely sum of 8.89€. Eat your heart out – that’s only just over £7 for 5 litres. Who said that this isn’t the life 😉

Although I’m now hundreds of miles south, I still keep an eye on the UK weather forecasts and see that the whole country is in the grips of an ‘arctic blast’ that has brought snow to many parts. Here in the Dordogne we also seem to have been affected by the same weather pattern including the same very chilly northerly winds. We haven’t had snow or anything like that – we’ve had brilliant clear blue skies for the last couple of days actually – but it’s all relative. The temperature yesterday reached a maximum of 9 deg C with a wind-chill factor making it feel rather colder and the forecast today is for a maximum of 8 deg C or so but still accompanied by the same cold wind.

So it’s not a good time for being out and about! I had to go to the supermarket on Friday and usually that’s one of the busiest days of the week. But not that day! The local population wisely decided to stay at home next to their wood-burners and since then it’s got quite a bit colder. I had a coffee with Wim and Sophie yesterday morning and poor Sophie had to pop out to pick up a few things. She was very cold when she came back and said that she was glad to be back home in the warm, and I didn’t blame her. Wim gave me directions to the Perigord Noir ‘bricollage’ where he said I might be lucky to find the floor tiles I need and later on, after lunch, I nipped over there to find out.

As it’s not a good time to be working outside on the X-Air , and as I’m waiting for price information from Raj Hamsa (the X-Air company who are based here in France) for the parts I’m thinking about ordering from them anyway, now’s a good time to get work done on and in the house. I’ve decided that I have to get my fireplace sorted out inside before I can get my roof work done. The reason is that the roofing man will be putting a tile cap on the top of the chimney the way they do here, to keep the rain out, and when the flue lining is put in for the wood-burner, either this would have to be removed again or it would need to be left off in the first place requiring the roofing man to make a return visit involving extra cost.

I have a large open stone fireplace that a previous occupant had sealed off. They then installed a small wood-burner beside it which had a flue that entered the chimney through a hole in the side of the fireplace. However, they then left the original fireplace in the crude form that it had always been in which was a kind of open semi-circular pit about 8 cm deep extending out something like a metre into the room as can be seen from the following pic.

So the bottom line is that if I want to install a wood-burner stove in the fireplace itself, I first have to fill and tile the ‘pit’ and then create some kind of slightly raised platform for the stove to stand on. I then have to block off the hole in the side of the fireplace (and somehow clean off all the gunge that the previous stove left behind), open up the flu and have a metal flue liner installed that will go right up from the wood-burner to the top of the chimney, after which the tile cap can be fitted on the top to keep the rain out.

My immediate problem is that, as can be seen in the pic, the whole of my downstairs is tiled right through in traditional 30 x 30 cm terra cotta (‘terre cuite’) tiles and for the job to look anything when it’s been done, I have to try and match these as closely as possible. After an extensive internet search, I think I have find a company in Toulouse who can supply, and more importantly, deliver tiles that appear from their pictures to be almost identical, although until I receive the sample that I have ordered, I will not know for sure. In the meantime, Wim suggested that I should try Perigord Noire Bricollage who stock a large range of floor tiles and that I just might be lucky. Well, as it happened, unfortunately I wasn’t. They had some terra cotta tiles of the right size but the colour was not quite right and they also had a bit of an edge pattern that would make them stand out too much against the existing ones. So I’m back to waiting for my sample to arrive from Toulouse.

In the meantime, time is marching on, the weather is getting colder and I have no heating of any kind in my house. But I just had a stroke of luck. My local Intermarche has just made a special offer on convector heaters, 2000 watt units that can be either floor mounted on plastic feet or wall mounted. The extraordinary thing is that they were being sold at roughly 1/3 of the price of similar units in the Brico Depot at Perigueux – so I walked out of the store with five of them in a trolley. The cashier said that they will be expensive to run, but they will be perfect when I wall-mount two in the lounge and one in each bedroom because even after I have a stove installed, there will always be periods like now in the late Autumn when you need a bit of background heat before you fire up the stove proper. The last one I’ll probably keep as a portable unit so it can be used in the kitchen, bathroom or wherever, I don’t know yet.

So that’s what my plans are, for now anyway.

The rain did eventually stop and the mist eventually disappeared but before starting serious work on the X-Air I thought that I should finish off a couple of jobs around the house that I’ve been meaning to get done for some time. I went across to the Brico Depot at Perigueux on Saturday but as it was raining, half of the population of the surrounding area had decided to go there too! So as the place was so packed out that you could hardly move, when I found out that I had to go outside (into the rain…) to buy the bags of ready-to-use concrete that I wanted, I decided to call it a day and come home 😐

I went back again on Monday and got everything that I needed. The first job was to dig a hole and put up the rotary clothes dryer that I’ve had for several weeks now and it was while I was digging the hole for it yesterday that I realised that I was becoming rather hot. Not to put too fine a point on it, after a while the sweat was just running off me, and not surprising really because when I checked my car temperature gauge, it read 27.5 deg C!

But anyway, I got the job done and the base tube of the clothes dryer concreted neatly into my back lawn so I then went on to work on my front lights. When I came here there was one bare bulb hanging out of the wall on wires near my kitchen door that worked from a switch in the kitchen and another light that was all corroded away further along the front of the house that I assumed worked from another switch in my lounge. A little while ago I put a rather nice outside light on the wall connected to the wires near the kitchen door and I recently put up another to replace the corroded one. Sure enough, that worked from the other switch as I’d expected and I was never very happy about that. So I’d bought a length of cable on Monday and yesterday I fitted a junction box under the eaves and ran the cable down so both of the existing lights worked off the same switch, the one in the lounge. And I’d also run another length of cable from the junction box along to the other corner of the house so I’d then be able to have three lights all working together equally spaced along the front of the building.

Because the walls of the house are of stone and are very irregular, I’d had to put a kind of solid flat mortar pad on the wall to mount the last light on using some of my concrete with the largest stones removed and when this morning I found that it and the base I’d mounted the clothes dryer in were rock solid, I pressed on to finish putting up the third light. Once again, after a while it began to get pretty hot, but this time not as hot as yesterday – my car temperature gauge this time only read 26.5 deg C! But still hot enough to be working outside in, I can tell you 🙂

Here are a couple of pics I took just as the daylight was beginning to fade this evening. I like the effect – I think it makes the place far more homely.

So then I could start on the X-Air. As I need to get hold of new cables for the elevator trim and brakes, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get much done on the main fuselage, so rather than remove the covers that I have on it, I thought I’d have a go at putting a wing together. I have two sets of tubes and covers but I thought that I’d do the ones that were on the aircraft when I originally saw it in Brittany as it certainly flew OK then. I laid a large tarpaulin out on my back lawn to assemble the wing on and it turned out that the one I grabbed first was the left one. The wing tubes are assembled and the covers fitted in a similar way to the AX3 so this wasn’t totally new territory for me. If anything, the X-Air’s are easier to do but the heat didn’t help matters 🙂

I found that although the bracing cables are in good condition, the outer plastic sleeves are damaged and a bit tatty so I swapped one from one of the spare wing tubes. I also found that when they’d disassembled the wings, they’d forced a bolt head against the upper fabric surface from the inside, which had put a small tear in it, but I pressed on anyway thinking that I’d just have to put a little adhesive patch on it when I’d finished. After much heaving and sweating I finally came to attach the bracing cable to the in-board end of the leading edge and at that point I noticed that the main attachment hole was slightly ovaled. I know that this was the tube that was fitted to the aircraft when I flew it and when I went to check the other leading edge tube, that was also slightly ovaled, so not good. However, when I checked the two spare leading edges, I found that they were in perfect shape, so not a disaster after all! All I need to do is swap the tubes around – after all, no point having good spares if you then don’t use them, and the chance of needing spares anyway is pretty remote.

So that’s what I’ve decided I’ll do. I’ll also replace the four wing bracing cables at the same time and while I’m doing it, I’ll get hold of a whole load of stainless steel bolts, nuts and washers and replace the existing ones as I go. At least now I’m in France I can just source high quality ones myself and not have to pay over the odds for the same, or possibly inferior ones, from the ‘manufacturer’ as I would have had to do in the UK. I’ve now got to order all the stuff I need and wait for it to be delivered so the job will take a bit longer, probably, than I’d originally planned. But I think it’ll work out better and once all the nuts and bolts have been replaced, they’ll never need doing again, not while I have the aircraft anyway. So tomorrow I’ll need to put together a list of everything I need – and take the wing I put together today, apart again. I’ll have to do that because it was too big to go through the door of my ‘cave’ and it’s now lying outside on the grass under the tarpaulin. But at least while I’m doing it, it’s not forecast to be quite as hot tomorrow as it was today 😉

It’s still raining. It’s hardly stopped in the last few days, never very hard but hard enough for you not to want to be out in it. And certainly hard enough to prevent me doing anything outside on the X-Air. It’s down to a light drizzle now but the météo for Plazac, see below, is telling us that we can expect it to stay with us for the whole of today and probably tomorrow too and also much of Monday.

I didn’t come here for this! I could have stayed in the UK if I’d wanted to be continuously rained on 😕

But seriously, it is a bit annoying because the X-Air has been standing tantalisingly outside my window for over a week now and I’ve been unable to do anything on it. And it’s been rained on every day! I’m beginning to wonder if I’m ever going to get into the air here in the Dordogne. And just to rub it in a bit, Wim flew over in his single-seat AX3 in a brief clear patch we had the other morning … he told me afterwards that he could see the X-Air standing safely covered up in my garden 😀

That’s exactly what it’s been like today – dull, misty, drizzling, everywhere damp and dripping. It was just like being back in the UK, except when I spoke to my mother on the phone this afternoon, it turned out that they were enjoying a lovely bright Autumn day 😐

Just my luck to be hit with this kind of weather at the exact time that I get the X-Air home, where it has to stand outside in the open. Yesterday was rather dull and chilly but at least it remained dry. The sun came out later in the afternoon so it warmed up a bit but by then I’d got everything out of the cabin and laid out neatly on the floor of my ‘cave’. I also made a better job of the covers when I replaced them so there wasn’t too much of the aircraft exposed to the rain. Here’s a shot I took of it this afternoon – note the milk bottle over the upturned open exhaust pipe 🙂

I noticed that there isn’t a VSI or a fuel pressure gauge fitted and as the ASI is in kmh, I’ll be removing MYRO’s instruments and using them in the X-Air. I may also fit MYRO’s exhaust temp sensors and gauge, I don’t know yet. In fact if it’s not too difficult/expensive, I’d really like to totally re-do the X-Air’s panel. I’ll have to look at it in more detail when I can eventually get onto the job – if this ruddy weather lets me 😕

As it was, I actually made good use of the day. I’ve mentioned on a few occasions that I’ve had boxes full of stuff that I brought with me from my house in the UK spread all over the floor of my ‘sejour’ (lounge) because for the time being I have nowhere to store anything. I’ve managed to empty quite a few boxes as I’ve set out furniture, filled cabinets and dug out the stuff that I need on a daily basis but my efforts have been a bit piecemeal to be honest. I needed to clear the sejour so I can get someone in to check out the work that I need done on my roof, chimney and fireplace so I can install a wood-burner so I decided that today must really be the day. And I succeeded. My sejour is now clear of boxes and everything that has to be kept stored is now documented and stacked up out of the way on my landing. And it’s a lovely feeling I can tell you 😀

Getting my new X-Air from Brittany down to Plazac was always going to be quite a project and Wim and I made the plans for it together. Wim put together a handy check-list so we wouldn’t forget anything important and on Monday I picked up Regis’s trailer and dropped it over at Wim’s so I could concentrate on getting all my tow-bar electrical connections working properly. When I’d finished only the left-hand flasher connection was still not working and I think this was down to a faulty circuit in the ‘buzzer’ unit that came with it. I’d ordered a trailer lighting board but as usual, the French supplier was hopeless and as it hadn’t shown up by Wednesday (and still hasn’t at the time of writing this post), Wim and I set to to cobbling one together from the lights on the back panel of his old trailer, an old length of 7-core cable that he luckily had and a trailer plug that I had the foresight to pick up from the local supermarket ‘just in case’.

We also had another stroke of luck. Regis’s trailer didn’t have a spare wheel, which we thought would be inviting disaster on such a long journey, and one of the tyres had sidewalls with a few cracks in as well. So Wim and I decided that we’d get another wheel and tyre at the nearest scrap-yard which is some way away at Terrasson. When we set out, Wim suggested that despite my cynicism, perhaps we ought to first try the two local small garages at Rouffignac. The first couldn’t help, but I managed to buy a replacement fuse for my rear and number plate lights that had fallen victim while we were getting the trailer light board working. However, I was gob-smacked when the mechanic at the second garage we went to took one look at the trailer wheel we’d taken with us, went out to the back and returned straight away with an identical wheel and tyre! When you think that the trailer had been made from old car bits that were probably twenty or thirty years old, this was some achievement, and I was even more surprised when he sold it to us for the princely sum of 10€ 🙂

My other problem, as usual, was Toddie. Because this would be a two-day trip, I couldn’t just leave him behind and if I’d had to bring him with us, this would have resulted in the space available inside my car being halved. But the problem was solved by Sophie, Wim’s wife, very kindly offering to look after him at their place for two nights. The extra night was necessary because we planned to leave for Brittany while it was still dark early the following morning and if Toddie was already there, this would make for the minimum of disruption and disturbance.

We needed to take a complete extending aluminium ladder and a smaller aluminium one that Wim had with us, the former to mount the wing tubes on, on the car roof for the return journey and the latter to place the X-Air’s main wheels on on the trailer. The track of the X-Air’s main undercarriage wheels is 1.60 metres and as the trailer is narrower than that, by placing the ladder across it we could safely mount the X-Air on it with each wheel in a gap between the rungs at each end of the ladder. The arrangement worked very well in practice because we could securely tie the ladder to the trailer and the aircraft to the ladder making the whole thing very safe and stable. Wim secured the ladders to the trailer the night before and so it was we left his place at Fleurac in the pitch dark at 6.30am on Thursday morning. Here’s a pic of our planned route.

Our route took us north via Perigueux, Brantome, Angouleme, Niort and Nantes up to Bertrand’s house in St Ave, a small town just outside Vannes, a total distance of 520 kms. Unlike the UK, there is no speed restriction on two-wheeled trailers in France, so we were able to make pretty good time, arriving at Bertrand’s at around 2.30pm. However, we knew that this would not be the case the following day so we knew we had to press on, get the aircraft and everything else loaded and get an early night ready for another early start the following morning. Bertrand had originally told me that he expected that I’d need two trips to get everything back but Wim and I were determined to try to get everything done and dusted in one. I didn’t know beforehand exactly what there was to bring back but it turned out that the X-Air was to come with a complete spare set of wings including covers, battens and ailerons together with various items such as a spare set of front forks and pair of main gear springs, not to mention the doors that had not been fitted. As the wings had been totally disassembled and the propeller, rudder and elevators removed, there was plenty to be fitted in and on the car for the journey back, and not only that but it also all had to be carefully stowed so nothing could rub together causing damage while in transit.

Bertrand and his wife Pascale had very kindly offered to put Wim and me up for the night and to entertain us to dinner that evening, so as we were coming to the end of the loading, they both went off to get the meal ready. By that time it was around 6.00pm or possibly a bit later and when we’d finished getting everything loaded, Wim and I were both horrified to see that because we’d loaded the X-Air a long way forward on the trailer, the front of the trailer tow-bar was only a couple of centimetres above the road surface! We couldn’t possibly leave it like that, of course, so we had to untie everything on the trailer and move the aircraft further back. This involved us each taking an end of the small ladder, lifting it and the X-Air up and moving the ladder back behind the trailer’s wheels. We succeeded in doing it and after replacing and securing everything else that had to go on the trailer, the trailer hitch was raised high enough for the journey. In fact I still wasn’t very keen because I knew that in England, our whole arrangement would have been stopped if it had caught the attention of the police and I suggested that perhaps we should make the return journey under cover of darkness, leaving that same evening. Wim wisely advised against this because both of us were pretty tired after the day’s exertions and he said that in any case, this was France and nobody would bat an eye-lid anyway. In fact he was absolutely right. In the whole journey of over 1000 kms there and back, we only saw ten CRS police vans that were in a convoy on some sort of exercise and obviously would have had no interest in us, and a small blue police car that zipped past us with a flashing roof light on the way to an incident somewhere. How different this was to England where you can hardly drive for a mile without there being wall-to-wall traffic police in marked and unmarked cars and all manner of other surveillance devices such as lasers and speed cameras. But that’s another story.

Bertrand and Pascale are moving house and Bertrand had suggested leaving the car and trailer at their new property a few kilometres away from their current home where they would be safer. We decided that as where they currently live is closer to the main road, we’d park them right outside for a quicker departure and take the risk, which we thought would be non-existent as St Ave is hardly Brixton or Central Manchester! Wim and I had a most enjoyable dinner with Pascale and Bertrand and turned in by about 9.45pm. Both of us slept pretty soundly but although I soon went back to sleep afterwards, I was awoken at 4.00am when the boulangerie next door started pounding the dough for the morning’s supply of loaves! We were up at 7.00am and breakfasting in advance of our departure when Bertrand joined us and shortly afterwards saw us off, before returning to his bed! It seemed that our leaving coincided exactly with the St Ave morning rush-hour but pretty soon we were on the main road from Vannes to Nantes heading south. French main roads are almost without exception beautifully smooth and we had hardly any problems as a result of the low height of the trailer tow-bar. This was the case for the whole journey and it only bumped the road surface on a tiny number of occasions, at a few rural railway level crossings and on speed bumps in some of the larger villages and towns. We pulled up shortly after it became light to see how things were doing and whether any ropes or ties had become loose and here are some shots I took at the time.

The last shot gives a pretty good impression of just how large the whole package of car, trailer and aircraft actually was and although we caught the eye of a few people on motorway bridges and of pedestrians and small boys in the towns and villages we passed through, it was surprising how on the whole we didn’t seem to attract too much attention. More to the point was that for reasons of safety, I had decided to restrict our speed to a maximum of 50 mph (80 kph). So we had another long day in prospect and after checking that everything was secure and nothing at all had shifted on the trailer, we therefore pressed on. From around Niort, Wim knows the road pretty well and whereas previously we had been referring to the satnav, from there we switched it off and I followed Wim’s directions. It worked out pretty well because much of the route we passed over had been recently re-surfaced and was therefore very smooth. Apart from making a few stops for drinks and comfort breaks, we decided not to stop to eat and to press on instead. The trip up to St Ave had been punctuated by rain and even the odd thunderstorm. We had been fortunate that apart from the odd light shower, the rain had held off while we had loaded up the car and trailer. Rain had also been forecast for our return journey, but in aviation met parlance, we were lucky to actually find ourselves in the relative high between two lows. This resulted in an almost cloudless blue sky to start off with only a few clouds beginning to build up as we drove south, which was really good news for us.

We hit the after-lunch rush-hour at Angouleme just as people were returning to their places of work but this didn’t delay us by very much, and we hit Perigueux, the only other place where our journey could have been similarly affected, well before knocking-off time. And so it was that we arrived at Plazac in fine, dry weather shortly after 4.00 pm. Nothing had gone amiss and everything had run smoothly during the whole journey and I thought that we had been very lucky that this was the case. I said to Wim that the idea of something like suspension failure on the trailer 500 kms from home didn’t bear thinking about and he agreed. But no matter, it hadn’t happened and we’d arrived home safe and sound with the X-Air and now it was time to unload before getting ourselves over to Wim’s where Sophie would have a meal waiting for us.

And so the day came to an end. After a most enjoyable dinner with Sophie and Wim, I returned home with Toddie and we were both in our beds by 11.00pm. Rain had been forecast for this morning but in fact I awoke to a beautiful bright but chilly Dordogne morning, and here are a couple of pics I took of the X-Air in its (temporary) new home.

It was quite a project, indeed an adventure, getting the X-Air here and it’s an enormous relief seeing it in my back garden at last. It was a demanding task that would hardly have been possible at all without the help of Sophie and Wim. I count myself as incredibly fortunate to have such lovely friends here in Plazac and just saying ‘Thank You’ hardly seems like enough.

The week-end that is, and in more ways than one as well. I’m due to phone Bertrand tomorrow (Monday) to agree on which day this coming week I’ll be collecting the X-Air. I’ll be borrowing a trailer so it’s important that I’ve finished fitting my new tow-bar to my car beforehand. The weather forecast was for fine weather on Saturday and today and sure enough, I was able to get the unit onto the car on Saturday leaving the electrics for today. The instructions said it would take about 60 minutes for the whole job, but that’s another story. It took me over half a day just to get to the stage shown in the pic below!

But unfortunately the weather then decided not to cooperate and I awoke today to dull, drizzly weather that looked to be set in for the rest of the day if past experience was anything to go by. And sure enough, that’s what happened. I got all of the electrical work done, though, and after I’d cleaned everything up and refitted the trim in the back of the car, I was quite pleased with the way the job had turned out actually. Only trouble was that when I tested the socket in the best way that I could, only two of the six pins worked properly! I could hardly believe it – I’ve done so many similar electrical connections on other cars and on MYRO of course, and if I’d had the same success rate with the latter, it would never have got into the air 😐

So now I’ve got to find out why things aren’t working. I think I’ll see if I can borrow Wim’s trailer board tomorrow and see if the connections work with that, but failing that, I’ll have to strip most of the trim out again and check all of the connections one by one, and that will be a pain.

By the way, on Saturday I visited the local supermarket wearing my usual tee shirt, shorts and flip-flops because the temperature here is still something like 21 degrees C. However, the locals seem to have decided that summer is definitely now over because most of them were wearing long trousers, jumpers and even coats and jackets. Hmmm… must be careful that I’m not labelled as an eccentric foreigner 🙂

I’ve just taken the dog out for his lunch-time constitutional and as we rounded the corner of the house into the area at the back, right there in front of us in the grass was a long, thin snake. It was about 3 feet long, pale green in colour with the characteristic yellow collar around its neck, which meant that it was a harmless grass snake. It slithered off quite rapidly towards the house as I approached it to get a closer look and managed to find a hole of some sort at the base of the bathroom outer wall into which it completely disappeared. This isn’t as bad as it sounds because the walls of my house are something like 30″ thick so I don’t expect it to turn up unexpectedly in the bathroom any time just yet 🙂

I spotted a snake similar to this slithering into undergrowth at the front of the house just after I arrived here in Plazac and when I mentioned it to my neighbour Jean-Claude, he said that there are dozens of them in the fields behind our houses. A herd of cows was put in there several days ago and my guess is that maybe they might have disturbed this one. If so, I hope it’s just the one because even though they’re perfectly harmless, I don’t much fancy having a garden full of the little devils 😐

I had a bit of a result today. I’ve been working for several days trying to unpack as many of the boxes as I can that are still spread out all over the floor of my lounge (sejour) and preventing me from using it as a proper living space. I’ve made pretty good progress actually and the place is coming on a treat now that there are mirrors, pictures and ornaments around making it much more homely. But what’s been bugging me is that when I packed up for the move from the UK, I emptied two wooden cabinets and put their contents into cardboard boxes and although I left the key for one of them in its door, the keys for the other together with the screws that held my table together I placed in an envelope which I dropped into one of the boxes. Yup, you’ve guessed it – when it came to it, I had absolutely no idea which of the many boxes this was 😕 I’d searched high and low including every ‘sensible’ place where I might have put them eg in the box containing the contents of the cabinet that the keys were for – but to no avail. Up to today that is.

I’d got to the point where I was checking every remaining box by removing its contents and either doing something with them (eg hanging pictures, putting out ornaments) or transferring them to another box when there at the bottom of one of the ‘kitchen’ boxes, I spotted what I was looking for. I’d completely forgotten that I’d popped them into an empty resealable cheese packet, you know, the ones that are like an envelope with a resealable strip along the top. The reason I was able to spot them was because my now long gone little mousie had managed to get into the box and had attacked the cheese packet not knowing that the contents were not what he was actually looking for and had made a ragged hole with his teeth that I could see a key through. So little mousie had been there and found the keys before me. If only he’d been able to tell me that before he met his unfortunate demise 🙁

Where do you go if you want new registration plates for your car? The same place you go for everything else, of course, the Internet! When I searched the Internet to find out how to get my car registered in France, I kept reading stuff about how you take the registration paperwork to some place or other to get your plates made up. Blow that for a lark! Yesterday I just searched – in French of course – for number plate makers, found one, paid by debit card and sent a copy of my paperwork over by email. Then VOILA! This morning at about 10.00am, my new plates arrived by courier. How good a service is that! Later on I replaced my old British plates for these new French ones making my transition to full French resident almost complete 🙂

Now here’s my car with its new French identity! Notice I’m a proud resident of Departement 24, the Dordogne, in the ‘region Aquitaine’ 😉

Only one down-side. Now I’ve got a French registration, I’ll have to start being much more careful about speed cameras 😀

Yesterday I received an official letter confirming the provisional French registration of my car and Mme la Facteuse also left an ‘Avis’ notifying that due to my absence, she couldn’t deliver a ‘Lettre Expert’ which needed signing for. So this morning I nipped down to the little post office in Plazac to send a couple of things off and also pick up the ‘Lettre Expert’ which, as I expected, turned out to be the registration document, the ‘Carte Grise’, itself.

So a big ‘Hooray!’ That’s another box ticked. One of the letters I sent off this morning contained the package of documents needed for my health service registration, so when that comes through I’ll have ticked everything off on my list 😀

Having done the car registration thing, I think I’ll put up a definitive ‘How To’ page on My Trike because there is quite a bit of conflicting stuff on the Internet and even the official French page I found only provided the basics and didn’t include the nitty-gritty, like having to provide a stamped-addressed envelope for the ‘Certificat Provisoire d’Immatriculation’ that came through yesterday.

My tow bar arrived today. Hats off to Messrs P F Jones who sold it to me and UPS for getting it here from the UK in 3 working days. What great service from both of them. Typical deliveries of things I’ve bought off the internet are 4 or 5 days for France and even longer from Germany. I tried to source a tow-bar kit locally but gave up after searching for a few hours and decided it was quicker, easier and more economical to get it shipped from the UK. Even if I could find one, I doubt it would be less than the £110 including delivery that it came out at. Here’s a pic of it just out of its packaging on my kitchen floor.

Look, I love France and the French people – I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t – but when it comes to business enterprise, I’m afraid my experience is that they’re a tad lacking compared to their British counterparts. So why aren’t the British taking the European market by storm? I have no idea – I think it’s probably something to do with lack of market or business confidence or maybe even a lack of national pride. Now I understand why, when I had my own small internet-based business, I regularly used to get orders from countries like France and Holland, even as far afield as Scandinavia. The UK market insists on getting quality and service and a good price and there doesn’t seem to be that same urgency over here. Some ex-pats might find it a bit frustrating, I guess, but it doesn’t bother me too much.

We’re expecting a few showers during the rest of this week but I’m hoping to get the tow-bar fitted so I’ll be all ready to pick the X-Air up. Wim’s not back till this week-end and he said he’d like to give me a hand, which I’d appreciate, but we don’t know exactly which day yet. Bertrand is off to England next week so for the moment I’ve pencilled in Sunday 7th October for the big day. I’ve also ordered a large tarpaulin off the internet which I can use to cover the X-Air for the journey and then cut up to make a set of outdoor covers out of. Now this I did source locally as quite coincidentally, the day before Mme. La Poste dropped a little brochure into my mailbox containing all sorts of offers, and lo and behold, there was a good quality 8m x 12m 240 gsm tarp for only 139.99€ compared to £190.58 for a 7m x 11m 250 gsm one from the same source that I got the tarp from that I made MYRO’s covers out of. The French delivery, though, will be the usual 3-6 days (yawn :-|)

By the way, regular readers might have noticed that I’ve already changed the My Trike banner image from a pic of MYRO to one of the new X-Air. I don’t think it’s out of place or too early and just recognises that the MYRO era has ended and it’s time to move on. I’ve been reading some of the recent posts on the BMAA forum bemoaning the state of the Association, the lack of involvement of the membership and the over-regulation that everyone is subjected to over there, so bearing in mind the associations that MYRO had with my own treatment at the hands of the BMAA and the system during not one but two permit procedures, maybe that’s a good thing. I think that my new French X-Air has got FUN written all over it and after my brief flight in Brittany, I can’t wait to get it into the air down here. It struck me the other day that whereas the French microlight scene is all about the personal freedom to have fun, it’s totally different back in the UK, where the philosophy is ‘if you’re having fun we can’t be regulating it enough’. It just isn’t like that here in France, but anyway, I’m out of all that stuff now and glad to be. Vive la Difference 😉

I’ve just transferred the cash over from my UK savings account to my French bank account to pay for the X-Air and including both the sterling to euro foreign exchange costs and the international transfer, the X-Air has cost me the princely sum of £4461. This is not a lot of money in my book for an aircraft with the hours it has on it and a 582 blue top engine, and that even though it needs a little bit of tidying up, is solid and immediately flyable. It doesn’t have any doors on it at the moment but Bertrand has said that they will come with it. The doors are an optional kit and as the climate is so much warmer in the Dordogne compared to the UK, I’m thinking that maybe I might actually leave them off. The elevator trim cable is quite rusty but Bertrand also said that various cables, pulleys etc will also be coming with it, so I’m hoping I’ll be getting a replacement in the price.

X-Airs in the UK were coming out in the region of £6000 and the costs involved in viewing them and if I bought one, getting it over to France, were very high, adding I would estimate somewhere between £500 and £1000 to that figure. So overall I think that things have turned out pretty well. One additional cost that I will have though, will be for some kind of outdoor covers. I can knock some up as I did for MYRO but that will take time and we’re now going into the winter, of course. We haven’t had much rain or wind ever since I came down here, but we’ve had both today as the remains of hurricane Nadine have sent some awful weather scurrying across into Europe. For us in south-west France, the worst has already passed but apparently all areas of the UK are set to be battered by high winds and torrential rain for another two or three days, so we can consider ourselves lucky really. It would be nice to get hold of some second-hand outdoor covers but I somehow doubt that that’ll be possible in the time available, so I have a bit of a dilemma as I could never leave the aircraft tied down outside without doors and with no covers on it at all. As I’ll be bringing it to my house initially, at least I’ll be able to just cover it temporarily with a tarpaulin but then I’ll have to decide what I’ll need to do for the future. And except for the X-Air that I went to see in the UK but didn’t buy, which would have come with a cheap set of outdoor covers, I’d have incurred the same cost anyway.

When I first came to France, I made a ‘To-Do’ list that seemed never to get any shorter because every time I ticked something off, I found something else that needed doing and had to be added to it. I mentioned in a post last month that it seemed to be going on forever, but this week-end all that came to an end. I came to the end of the list at last and I’ve now finally got my life back again!

I found an official translator in Perigueux and at the end of the week sent her off a copy of my birth certificate that I’d had authenticated at the Marie in Plazac. So when she returns the translation to me, it’ll only be a matter of sending it in with all of the other papers that I’ve already got, in order to complete my French health service registration. Then, having got my car CT’d on Monday, I also went into the Prefecture’s office in Sarlat with the huge wad of papers needed to get it registered in France only to find out that (a) I had to provide them with a stamped addressed envelope that I hadn’t got, so my Carte Grise could be sent to me when it was done and (b) even though no import tax was due, I had to provide a certificate obtainable from the Centre des Impots in Sarlat confirming that fact. Discretion being the better part of valour, I decided to try to complete the job the following day, which I did and after parting with a cheque for 150.50€ I came away with the certificate confirming that the registration was now proceeding. Result! 🙂

By now I was on a roll, so I decided to press on and get my UK Self-Assessment Tax Return done as well. After having procrastinated for weeks, I knocked it off in an hour or so and had the unanticipated pleasure of finding out that I can now expect a tax refund of £38! Not a lot, but better than a demand for payment, eh 😉

I can’t say how great this feels, because it means that I really am now properly retired. OK, I’ve got a couple of small things that I want to do to help out the guys who bought my business off me, but officially the period during which I agreed to support them ended last week-end and now there’s no pressure. So now I can turn my mind to my house and the X-Air which I can’t wait to get my hands on, and I don’t have to feel guilty any more that I should really be doing something else. And that’s a great feeling, I can tell you 😀

The last few days have really put a smile on my face. On Saturday I went with Victor to the flying club at Castillonnes where he’s having lessons to get his French microlight licence. We found out on Friday that neither of the instructors who I wanted to talk to about me getting my French ‘brevet’ would be there after all, but I decided to go along anyway to see the place and meet a few of the members. In fact I managed to do more than that because after meeting a few of the guys who were there and having a look around the hangars, one of the members kindly offered me a short flight in one of the club’s Hurricanes that they use for training.

You don’t see Hurricanes in the UK because of the ridiculously prescriptive and over-regulated system represented by BCAR Section S and administered by the BMAA, which in effect means that the UK market is frozen to anything other than the pathetically few microlight models that are currently available. Regis used to have a Hurricane but sold it a few months ago to buy the accident damaged Zenair that he is currently restoring in his garage. They are an open tandem design which I do not much care for because I’m not keen on tandems anyway, but also because of the need to wear a helmet and visor as you would in a flexwing. But if it gets me up in the air, then I’ll fly in it! We had a short flight of about twenty minutes and I was amazed at how even within a distance of about 60 kms the land totally changes, from being hilly and wooded in the Dordogne where I live to open and flat in the Lot and Garonne around Castillonnes.

Here are a couple of shots of the Hurricane I flew in that are of awful quality because I took them on my steam-powered mobile phone (none of those fancy high tech jobs for me…). But just look at the weather in them and weep, all you guys in the UK. The Summer has been like this the whole time down here – just a pity that I haven’t had an aircraft to enjoy it with 😐

On Sunday I had a fantastic day, driving up to La Bretagne (Brittany) as I’d planned, to see the X-Air I mentioned in my last post. I had to get up and leave pretty early as the drive was about 600 kms (360 miles) each way and I wanted to get there and back in a day. I managed to do it and got home feeling very tired at about midnight, but it was well worth it. The aircraft was just as it had been described to me by Bertrand, one of the owners. It has been used in the last few years for just the summer months for public pleasure flights, flying from a very short runway on the flat sand dunes that comprise the beach at Plouharnel. It was originally a narrow door 1999 model but was modified using parts from another X-Air to be a wide door, although it has been flown with no doors fitted to give passengers a better view. Although it has had people climbing in and out in that time, it’s still a good solid aeroplane and despite its age, compared very favourably to the much younger one that I went to see in my recent abortive UK visit. I had a short flight in it and found that it flies very smoothly and is well balanced with no vices. Unlike X-Airs in the UK which you daren’t touch because of the dreaded mod system that is designed to ensure that that is and will always remain the case, this one has had one or two tweaks done to it. For example, there’s a rudder trim tab which means that at cruise speed, you can trim for pitch and then more or less sit back and enjoy the view and Bertrand demonstrated that because there were no doors fitted, you can then make the aircraft gently turn in either direction by sticking an arm out into the airflow. Very interesting! I’ll give a lot more details in future posts, but suffice to say that after going all over it and giving it a thorough once-over, before leaving to return home I decided I’d buy it and handed over a 500€ cheque by way of a deposit. Now I can’t wait to get it home 😀

Here are a few pics I took of it while I was there.

And if you click on the image below you’ll be able to watch a short video of it that I also shot.

And after such an enjoyable week-end, the good things also kept on coming on Monday. I have to get a CT (French MOT) done for my car before I can get it onto the French register and before I made all the plans for this past week-end, I had made a booking at the local CT test station in Montignac. I would have preferred a lie-in on Monday morning after the Bretagne trip, but I dragged myself and the car down there bright and early and I’m glad to say that after clearing up a few queries that the young test engineer had about some of the English documents, it flew through. So now the way is clear for me to press on with the registration process, and I’m very glad about that as it means that I’m now beginning to get towards the end of what seemed to be an interminable ‘To-Do’ list. And that is a relief, I can tell you 🙂

Well, you don’t do you? I thought that I’d try a two-pronged attack after my recent buying experience by placing a ‘wanted’ ad in the UK as well as looking out for a suitable new aircraft. It’s been quite effective, as I’ve had quite a few possibles put through to me and they are still coming in. One that I got in almost immediately after placing the ad and which I was very interested in, was then put up on AFORS and sold within 24 hours, so it was obviously as good as it looked. But it’s now gone, so I thought that I’d stop trying to hurry things and just see what turned up. And waddayouknow, I’ve received two rather nice surprises 🙂

Another X-Air I got through yesterday looked pretty much along the lines I’m aiming for – not very much permit left and a price that reflects that – so I’ve asked the seller for some pictures and more information. Very encouraging, and I can’t wait to see what comes through as a result.

But what’s even more encouraging is that after looking out for suitable aircraft for weeks here in France and finding more or less nothing in that time, something has popped up right out of the blue which has really caught my attention. Here’s a pic of it taken from the advertisement.

It’s a 1999 582 model with only 400 total hours on it and only 30 hours since overhaul on its blue top engine. The sellers, as I know they are having contacted them and spoken to one of them, are two instructors and have only used it for a few hours per year giving ‘baptemes de l’air’, or pleasure flights, to the public during the summer months. They describe it as being in perfect condition, as it would have to be to fulfil the function it has been doing, and they say that in recent years they have dismantled it each winter to thoroughly check, clean and lubricate it and replace anything that needed changing. This year they have decided to sell it with a number of spares etc due to having nowhere to hangar or store it over the winter months and they are offering it at what they describe as a ‘very interesting price’. And it certainly is, working out at only £4400 after converting it from euros to pounds-sterling!

Wim has said it’s obviously too good to be true and maybe it is, but I’ll never know unless I see it. So that’s what I’m going to be doing this Sunday. The sellers are delighted and have given me first refusal on it in case any other possible buyers come out of the woodwork and one of the reasons why they suggested this week-end was so I would get a chance to fly it, which I think is a good sign for starters. It’s based up in Bretagne (Brittany) so I’ll probably be looking for somewhere to stay the night up there and making the drive up on Saturday after having been flying during the day with Victor. I must say, I’m rather looking forward to this week-end and between now and then, I also have the pleasure to look forward to of having Wim and Regis round for a few beers tomorrow. Call it a boys’ night in if you like, and I won’t take bets on what the main topic of conversation will probably turn out to be 😉

After enjoying an evening meal with Wim and Sophie on Wednesday, which I always do very much, Wim and I were talking about my plans now that the purchase of the X-Air has fallen through. He said that his friend Victor, who is a Citroen 2CV fanatic and has recently restored one that now looks as though it’s just come out of the showroom, is training for his French ULM licence at an airfield about 60km away where dual tuition is only 60€ per hour. He suggested that I might like to go with him next time and I agreed that it was a good idea, because as well as getting some local flying in with a French instructor and keeping current (remember, I haven’t properly flown since April when I flew MYRO down from the UK), I could use it as an opportunity to get my French licence too.

I’ve since spoken with Victor who has now gone off for a week or so in his 2CV to Spain to visit his son, so we’ve made plans for us to go flying together on Saturday 15th September. This will be subject to weather, of course, but hopefully there won’t be any problems on that score.

I’m really looking forward to it and the chance to meet some other ULMistes and get involved in the local ULM scene 🙂