I’m glad to say that the seller of the X-Air that I went to see in England last week has replied by email today saying that he’s now reconsidered and will be returning my deposit after all. I’m very pleased about that because on a personal level I thought he was a very nice chap and I didn’t relish the thought of all the nastiness that would have ensued if we’d had to take the matter to Court. Anyway, that now won’t happen and I sincerely hope that he manages to sort the engine problem out and find another buyer for his X-Air.

So now it’s time to have another go and try to find the right aircraft. I placed an ‘X-Air Wanted’ ad on the AFORS web site a couple of days ago and have already received information on some interesting aircraft. One in particular is very interesting but it’s early days yet. Wim tells me that winter flying down here in the Dordogne is lovely because it usually isn’t that cold (last winter was a bit of an exception) and compared to the summer with its strong sun and resulting thermic activity, the air in the winter is very smooth and great to fly in. So I’d love to have an aircraft by then but I don’t intend to go rushing into anything for the moment, and certainly not after my last experience. In the meantime I’ve got lots still to do, to do with the move to France and also on my house. For starters, there’s a little bit of wind damage that needs to be fixed on my roof and I also need to install a wood burner before it starts to get cold. Know what? There’s never enough time, is there 😯

Well, I returned to England as planned with a view to completing the purchase of the X-Air. I’ll not go into the full detail but once more it appears that I managed to get involved with yet another awkward person who has managed to disrupt my plans yet again. I’d put up the whole of the agreed price of the aircraft so I could fly and evaluate it on the French 3rd-Party Only insurance that I’d taken out before leaving for the UK and ensure that it was as the seller had described it in his advertisement. Full risk cover is only available in France on aircraft valued at 10000€ or more, which excluded the X-Air, so putting up the money would have indemnified the seller of all risk while I was flying his aircraft. But the advantage would also have been that if the aircraft had checked out OK and was ‘as advertised’, I could then have quickly concluded the sale and made plans to depart for France at the earliest opportunity. On the other hand, if it had not, I would have had the strength of the law behind me to ensure that I got my money back.

Unfortunately, I never got a chance to fly it even, because when I started it up (I’d even filled it up because the seller had said that it was ‘Ready to fly away’) I’d got the biggest mag drop that I’ve ever seen at any time on any aircraft – about 600 RPM on one side. The other side checked out fine so I even then went to the lengths of removing, cleaning and re-gapping the plugs before trying again. But to no avail because the mag drop still remained, indicating that the engine was unserviceable and unsafe to take off with. After all, that’s why we always carry out mag checks, isn’t it.

The aircraft has had something of a history of this according to its log books, so having concluded that it was not ‘as advertised’, I did what I was legally entitled to do, rejected it and asked for the return of all the monies I had paid. I would have had no intention anyway of continuing with the purchase after that as a further consideration was that even if an attempt had been made to rectify the problem, there is no way that I would have been prepared to take off and do a water crossing immediately afterwards followed by a flight of almost the length of France over terrain much of which, especially further south, is quite hostile.

It’s then that things became nasty. If the seller had started and checked the engine before he put his aircraft up for sale, he would have discovered the mag drop for himself and it was because he had not done that it was left for me to do so. Nevertheless, he then took it upon himself to retain my deposit. As the problem that resulted in the cancellation of the sale was of his own making, he cannot do that of course, but I now have the tedious matter of mounting an action against him in the Small Claims Court if he does not comply with my request to return the money.

What the heck’s going on that I keep getting involved in all this aggravation? All that I want to do is retire quietly and enjoy flying microlights in France but it seems that I’m being thwarted at every turn, by events, circumstances or awkward people. I had no idea that I’d be on the receiving end of all this stuff and I have to confess that it’s all now beginning to get rather tedious 😐

Fingers crossed! I’ve now been here in Plazac for exactly two months and as anyone can soon see from reading My Trike over that period, I’ve had a lot of ups and downs of all sorts in that comparatively short time. But despite them all, I’ve never regretted coming here for a moment. I always said that I thought I’d enjoy a much better quality of life in my retirement here than I would have done in the UK and already I’m pretty sure that that will be the case. I love the area, the climate, the people here and my house and although from time to time, I do miss having company at the moment (besides Toddie that is), I have plenty to keep me occupied. And who knows what might happen on that score, anyway, as you never know what might be round the next corner, do you.

But the other big reason for coming was to spend as much of my time as I could flying my microlight in the freedom of France compared to the highly regulated and controlled environment of the UK and this took a real knock, of course, when I lost MYRO. But I always said that I would only ever see this as putting my microlighting ambitions back a bit and not as an end to my hopes and plans, and I’m excited to say that this is how it is now turning out, far sooner than I might ever have dared hope for 😀

A couple of things have happened that have made the unexpected possible. Firstly, I received the insurance payout for MYRO. The loss adjuster acting on behalf of the insurer was a pleasure to deal with, if it’s possible to say such a thing under the circumstances, and once all the formalities had been completed, I was pleasantly surprised to see the agreed amount already in my bank account when I logged on one morning quite a bit sooner, I have to say, than I originally expected. So it’s thanks to him and thanks to my insurer for making what could have been a stressful and depressing process as painless and quick as possible.

The other thing was that I completed the sale of my business, which I’d had on the market since before leaving England and had been involved in negotiations for, for several weeks beforehand. So it was with a sense of pleasure and anticipation that I was able to start scanning the ‘microlights for sale’ ads safe in the knowledge that if I did find one that was suitable, I could enter into meaningful discussions with the seller. The only problem was that because of the ridiculously high prices that second-hand machines are being put on the market at in France (see my earlier posting entitled ‘My Table and Chairs’ which refers to this problem), I was probably going to have to search the UK market for what I wanted.

This meant that I wouldn’t be able to inspect possible purchases myself, not immediately anyway, as with everything that I still had, and still have, to do in connection with my residency here, there was no way that I could just drop everything and head back to the UK. I got round this by contacting a few trusted friends who agreed to take a look at anything that I was interested in on my behalf and reporting back to me on what they’d found. I am indebted to Peter, Ken’s brother who is now flying the X-Air which Ken and I found in Lancashire some two or three years ago and which we worked together on to get it through its permit while it was at Linton, and which I’ve also talked about and posted pictures of on several occasions here on My Trike. I’m also indebted to Rick Goddin who, although we’ve still never met in the flesh, offered not only to fly some distance, if necessary, in his Sky Ranger to view any aircraft I might be interested in, but also to repeat the process with me on board if I then came over with the thought of buying it. Many thanks indeed to these two gentlemen to whom I owe a large debt of gratitude.

I have to say at the outset, that much as I’d like to have one, my budget precluded my going for a 4-stroke engined aircraft. 4-strokes have a reputation for being more reliable than 2-strokes, burning less fuel and having more power for a given weight. On the down-side however, they are much more expensive when new, and therefore push up the prices of 4-stroke second hand aircraft, and are also more complex and costly to maintain. So that meant I would probably have to look for an aircraft with a 582 Rotax 2-stroke engine, the big brother of the 503 that MYRO had.

I spotted a very nice Thruster on the AFORS (Aircraft For Sale) web site that had been upgraded to a 582 Sprint and that fell nicely into my budget. However, the asking price was a snip and when I phoned, the seller had already taken a deposit and was putting it through permit for the new owner. This was a shame as far as I was concerned, because it was a comfortable two-seat machine with good performance and with a good, strong undercarriage that would have been ideal for the kinds of runways we have down here. That didn’t leave many other realistic choices as I’d already ruled out a 503 or 582 Rans S6 because of its inherently weak undercarriage that would always make landings a nerve-racking affair. The Rans nose leg has a tendency to collapse when subjected to anything resembling a hard landing, which can be quite a common occurrence down here, and I couldn’t face any more traumas like that 😕

My thinking was similar to when I first decided to bring MYRO down with me to the Dordogne. After the challenge of the long flight down, I don’t need a high performance aircraft for touring once I’m here. Indeed, aircraft such as the CTSW, C42 and Sky Ranger even would find it challenging to operate from most of the many short runways in this part of the Dordogne due to the longer take off and landing distances they require. Also, I will be quite happy to fly slowly and enjoy the scenery, taking photographs and videos, which I enjoy sharing, as I do so. So that made me turn to the trusty X-Air, the newer design, big brother of the AX3, of which there were three on AFORS. I phoned and enquired about all three, and these were my thoughts on each of them.

The first one in Northern Ireland was a 2001 aircraft that was priced competitively at £5900 and had between 450-500 hours on it (the seller was not specific). However, it had been totally overhauled with new skins fitted in 2010 and there had been limited hours added since then, as the seller said he had bought it for someone else who had decided that he didn’t have the money for it after all, so he had to re-sell it! A bit of a strange business, in some ways. And also it was being offered as just the bare aircraft with no add-on mods or accessories.

Next there was a 2000 aircraft with Mylar skins that were fitted in 2010, that was priced at £6999. The airframe and engine had 325 hours on them and although the engine had been regularly maintained, it had never been overhauled. The seller said that the engine was in excellent condition and concentrated on singing the praises of the Mylar skins. However, the official life of a Rotax 582 engine is 300 hours, after which they are running ‘on condition’. This was also the situation when we found Ken and Peter’s X-Air a few years earlier, and much as it sticks in the seller’s throat, it does mean that the price of the aircraft must be significantly marked down as the new owner has to allow for an engine and gearbox overhaul costing £2000 at any time, no matter what the seller’s previous experience of the engine has been. The seller also suggested that this consideration was outweighed by the aircraft having Mylar skins. Now Mylar is not the same as Ultralam, which is what MYRO’s skins were made of. Ultralam is very UV resistant and as a result, skins made from it have very long lives. Indeed, MYRO’s were the original ones from when it was new in 1994, which emphasises this point. However, Mylar is made from the same material as Dacron and so has a similar resistance to UV and this means that Mylar skins will last no longer than Dacron if exposed to similar conditions. That means that the main argument for Mylar has to be one of performance, fuel economy mainly rather than airspeed as the latter is more or less dictated by the design of the aircraft’s wing. On this point the seller was vague and couldn’t quantify what the improvements were compared to a Dacron covered aircraft. I offered a price much lower than the asking price which the seller turned down and I see the aircraft is still on AFORS but at a new ‘final’ reduced price of £6650. I still don’t think he’ll get it, but who knows, but I crossed it off my list in any case.

This finally made me turn to the last aircraft on my list, a lovely X-Air being sold in Kent, not far from where I used to live. And it also turned out that the seller and I had a lot more than that in common. He had done his training with Rosie at Canterbury, the same as I had, and he’d finished it off in the X-Air in question, which he’d finished building in 2004. So in fact, Rosie had flown this actual aircraft. It also turned out that it had received its annual permit inspections from Jim, who used to inspect MYRO when Rosie owned it and although we’d never met, I’d spoken to several times about the original flexwing ‘our trike’ that Ken and I had bought when we first decided to get into microlighting, and when I first started to write the My Trike blog. So it’s a small world!

The X-Air was at Ashford, Kent (and still is at the time of writing) which meant that Peter only had a very short distance to travel to view it for me after my initial conversations with the seller. Here’s a pic of the aircraft in question.

Although it was completed eight years ago in 2004, it still only had 135 engine hours and 120 airframe hours on it, less than a tenth of MYRO’s figures! It had never needed new skins in that time, of course, and had always been hangared meaning that its skins were in excellent condition, as Jim confirmed to me in a phone call. But it was being sold with a new, unused set of outdoor covers in any case, which I found a further attraction, being as the aircraft might have to be left out in the open for a year or so before I am in a position to be able to afford a new hangar. It was also being offered with an ICOM A3 transceiver package fitted that included a pair of headsets, which I also found attractive as my Vertex isn’t officially approved for use in France (or the UK for that matter) while the ICOM is (well, more or less anyway). It also came with a DUC two-bladed prop, which I’m told is a very efficient design, carburettor heaters to prevent icing, which are an extra, and a tail-mounted strobe which is also an extra. All in all I thought this was a great package and after Peter had nipped down to view it for me, the seller and I agreed a price and I paid him a deposit.

This was the easy bit done, and in fact this all happened a few weeks ago. I didn’t want to mention anything, however, until all of the necessary arrangements were in place and the final part of the jig-saw dropped neatly into position this morning when I received an email from the French insurance company that I’d been referred to by my friend Wim. ‘Insurance, what’s the problem?’ you might ask. It’s this. Just as with MYRO, I don’t want to keep the aircraft on the UK register because of all the hassles and on-costs that that would involve, especially if it was operated in France. So it will need to be insured by a French insurer who must be prepared to take it on initially with its UK registration, which will then be changed. I’ve had the same issue with my car, which I also have here and am in the process of transferring to French registration. And today I got the email saying that this is OK, that the change must be made within a month of the aircraft coming to France, which suits me, and detailing the costs involved. The main difference between France and the UK is that French insurers only offer ‘all risks’ cover, like I had on MYRO, on aircraft valued at 10000€ or more, so this excludes the X-Air and I will therefore have to carry the ‘hull damage’ risk myself. But surely lightening can’t strike in the same place again can it? 😯

My plans are to return to the UK to evaluate the aircraft and complete the purchase this coming week. There is a complication insofar as I can’t leave Toddie behind as he’s much to old to be left in kennels, so I have first to return by car to the UK with Toddie (Wednesday 22nd), complete the purchase and probably fly it to Headcorn airport (Thursday 23rd), carry out general handling and familiarisation flights at Headcorn (Friday 24th), depart for France in the X-Air from Headcorn, leaving my car and Toddie at my stepson’s (Saturday 25th), arriving at Galinat airfield in the Dordogne (Sunday 26th), returning to the UK by a Ryanair low cost flight from Limoges (Tuesday 28th) and finally, returning to France by car with Toddie (Thursday 30th).

And that should be that! After all this toing-and-froing, my plans for my retirement in Plazac should hopefully be back on track after all the upsets and disruption that have occurred over the past two months. I hope so anyway, but we’ll have to wait and see. In any case, I’m looking forward very much to the long flight down again and just keeping my fingers crossed that the weather will be kind – and that the vis is better, so this time I actually get to see a bit of France along the way 😀

I’ve been feeling a bit miffed for the last couple of days. I came to Plazac to enjoy life in my retirement and leave the pressures of the daily grind behind, but I’ve found that apart from the odd few days, or so it feels anyway, when I’ve been able to enjoy myself just doing nothing, I still seem to be finding myself most of the time sitting indoors in front of my computer with the sun beating down outside. And not from choice either!

A couple of days ago, I put together yet another ‘to-do’ list and just about everything on it was time-sensitive. And that, of course, means stress – just how can we ever manage to escape from these things? The items, in no particular order of priority but just as they came to me when I jotted them down the night before, included

• Go to post office, must send letters that have to be sent locally and to the UK (and that I already spent time creating anyway) …
• Car, complete extremely complex paperwork to register it in France as one deadline already missed due to UK manufacturer only just sending paperwork required by the French authorities after several weeks, sign yet more paperwork received from the French insurer and, oh, complete and send off the paperwork to cancel the UK registration …
• Microlight insurance, send email to possible French insurer that a friend told me about as I have upcoming plans (of which more later) and a fixed deadline now rapidly approaching …
• French health registration, which I thought I’d done with, sort all of the papers including the ones completed by the office at Terrasson, which have been sent back to me in a wad by the health authority, get my birth certificate officially translated by a translator at the Court of Appeal of Bordeaux and send them all back again, together with the translation (yeah I know, don’t ask me 😕 ) …
• UK Income Tax Return, fill it out and return it before the tax deadline …
• Old business, disposed of some weeks ago, assist new owner for agreed time period …
• Local microlight airfield, contact owner, check cost, availability etc …
• Water company, pay latest bill before it’s overdue …

And so it seems to go on, a never-ending stream of paperwork that as fast as you get it cleared, another batch seems to find its way into your mail box. And, of course, all the more tricky to deal with because the emails and correspondence I write also have to be in French 🙂

But I guess that’s the game I signed up for when I came here and I’m only miffed really because it just seems to be never-ending. It won’t be, of course. The car and health registration will only have to be sorted out once and the microlight stuff too. The MYRO problems haven’t helped in that area either, of course. And paying water bills is something we have to do wherever we are – and at least I don’t now have the spectre of a monthly mortgage hanging over me these days, as I did before I sold my house in the UK. So on balance, although I grumble, and don’t we all, it ain’t really all bad 😉

But to finish off and show just how peeved I was, here’s a pic of me taken yesterday…

Wochit…. who just said, ‘Miserable looking perisher…’

But for me a glimpse of foodie Heaven!

I’ve never been a great meat eater. I’m not a veggie by any stretch of the imagination and although I could go for days without eating any meat at all, I have no wish to be one. I like a good steak, a nicely barbecued sausage, a well cooked shish-kebab or succulent roast chicken as much as the next man, but I don’t have to have meat any more than I have to have potatoes or cabbage, which quite honestly, I rarely eat. Even before I came here I was already eating lighter, more easily prepared meals that, coincidentally also happened to be ‘more healthy’, although that wasn’t my principle reason for choosing them. I think the main consideration was that as I was mainly ‘cooking’ just for myself following my separation and divorce, I wanted things that were convenient, quick and easy to prepare and didn’t need a lot of clearing up afterwards, so I had gravitated towards dishes like rice, chicken, vegetables and, of course, salads.

Salads always have been a favourite of mine and as it has been pretty hot for most of the time I’ve been here, I tend to have one almost every day. I like to make a whole batch in advance, the way I did again this evening. I wash, chop and mix all of the ‘dry’ ingredients, like lettuce, radishes, carrots, onions and courgettes, then spin them to get any remaining water out and store the mix in containers in the fridge. Then I just grab a handful when I want a salad, add the ‘wet’ ingredients like cucumber, tomatoes and peppers and finish it off with some chopped cold meat or cheese.

And, of course, no salad is complete without its dressing. To me, a salad without dressing is like strawberries without cream, Guinness without a head or spotted dick without custard – look the last one up, you non-English speakers 😉 It just ain’t right! And the French, naturellement, are the masters when it comes to salad dressings. My local Intermarche has quite a few to choose from and I haven’t yet finished working my way through them yet, so I’ve still got a few treats in store. When I first came here, I started off with Vinaigrette Nature, which is quite simply vinegar with olive oil spiced up with Dijon mustard – but proper Dijon mustard, mind, not your phoney stuff. It was cheap and delicious and made any salad into a real treat. Next time I scanned the shelf and the one that caught my eye was Red Wine Vinegar vinaigrette with Red Onions. My goodness, when I tried it for the first time, to me this could have been the pinnacle of vinaigrettes and I was worried that I might have peaked too early 😉 But anyway, I stuck with it a few more times until yesterday when I found that it was also a favourite of the latest intake of tourists and the shelf had been cleared. Quelle horreur! But I didn’t panic because I knew that this being France, there was sure to be an equally delicious alternative to choose from, and I was right. Just a bit further along I found vinaigrette made from Vinaigre de Cidre, Jus de Pomme et Echalotes. It even sounds delicious, and although I also bought a bottle of Vinaigrette a la Moutarde a l’Ancienne (another traditional Dijon mustard recipe) as a back-up, I just knew that I’d struck gold with the first one.

By the way, while I’m typing this, I’m also enjoying a glass of rose wine, well-chilled or ‘frappe’ as they say in France, and a fine accompaniment to …… well, almost anything 🙂 Many people who know no better turn their noses up at rose but I used to work in the wine trade many years ago and know that all types of wine have something to offer. Rose is the ideal summer drink, light and fruity and if you’re too snobby to drink it, that’s your hard luck and you don’t know what you’re missing. The roses that find their way to the UK are invariably a bit ‘thick’ on the palate, heavy and over-sweet, but over here that definitely needn’t be the case. Just like the vinaigrettes, I’ve also been working my way through the roses (OK, and the whites and reds too…) and haven’t had a bad one yet. Everyone knows about Rose d’Anjou from the Loire which when bought in the UK tends to reinforce the rose image that I’ve described above. But Cabernet d’Anjou is usually a different kettle of fish (if you’ll excuse the description in relation to wine) being lighter and drier in character. And I’ve had some lovely ones in the last few weeks that have proved that. And I’ve also had some marvellous surprises. The Intermarche stocks rose wines not just from Anjou but also from all of the principal wine regions and many of these as well as being fresh and fruity, are also deliciously dry. The one I’ve just taken a sip of is AC Costieres de Nimes, a southern French wine from the burgundy region, which we usually associate with hot, red wines. But this isn’t – it’s light, fruity and beautifully dry but with 13% alcohol, which initially looks surprisingly high, but isn’t when you think of the region it’s coming from. And know what? It was under 3€ a bottle!

But enough of that, back to this evening’s salad. Here’s what it looked like before I sat down outside in the early evening sunshine and devoured it.

Sometimes I enjoy a glass of white or rose wine with my salad but this evening I decided on a delicious cold glass of Cidre Doux, sweet French cider which only has a 2% alcohol content and goes down a treat. Often I like to have chopped garlic sausage especially or cheese on top of the salad but this evening I chose two chopped small frankfurter sausages instead.

And it was lovely and Toddie also enjoyed his share of the frankfurters 😉

Now after a fairly scorchingly hot day, it looks and feels as though we might have a thunderstorm, so I’ll bid you adieu and good night.

Before I left England, I gave away lots of things because I just didn’t have the space in the truck to bring them. When my 7 tonne truck was weighed, as they are, on the way over at Dover, it was almost a tonne overweight and if I’d tried to pack any more in, I might have added the last straw that broke the camel’s back! One of the casualties in this was my old garden set, comprising a large four-legged oval plastic table (seen in lots of my MYRO repair pictures actually), its accompanying six plastic chairs with separate cushions in a tasteful shade of pink and the large pink sun umbrella that capped it all off.

I gave all of this away to a neighbour, along with my gas-fired barbecue and cylinder, but although I was sad to see it go, and it would all have been very handy to have down here, believe me, I don’t regret it for a minute. She loved getting it as much as I enjoyed giving it to her and she showed her appreciation by giving me a bottle of French wine before I left, which gave me a lot of pleasure.

Sitting outside my house down here wasn’t very much of a priority when I first arrived but as the weather has improved and it’s become hotter, I soon realised why it is that sellers of French houses around here often list an ‘outdoor’ or ‘summer’ kitchen in the list of attractions that their property has to offer. The reason is that at this time of year they spend an awful lot of time outside, sitting, eating and generally enjoying each other’s company. From time to time I must confess that I’ve felt quite envious when Jean-Claude has been entertaining guests next door with his family and the conversation, laughter and whoops of pleasure have carried across into my garden.

Well, I don’t have such a group around me yet to enjoy the space with me around my house, but it doesn’t mean that in due course I won’t have. And in any case, I want to be able to sit outside in the cooler evening air, under my lime tree, enjoying a cold glass of beer, cider or rose wine! So after I’d managed to get the grass cut and under some sort of control, I decided that I needed a set of table and chairs to allow me to do just that.

But where to look? Now I’ll be perfectly honest here. Prices of some items in France are truly horrendous compared to what I’ve been used to in the UK. I find this extraordinary because like me, French citizens can purchase things from wherever they want, so why pay 150€ for a clapped out, second-hand motor lawn mower when you can get yourself onto Ebay and buy a brand new one for less from Germany? That’s what I did, and I also did the same with my powered brush cutter for the same reason, but for some reason the French seem not to. I ask you, who did the seller really think would come along and buy a rotary mower, without engine and blade, of unknown brand and hand over the princely sum of 50€ 🙂 To be honest, in the UK it would have been a ‘down to the tip’ job, but not here apparently.

There is a serious side to this, of course. I’m not in any way a fan of unbridled ‘consumption for consumption’s sake’, but if you expect to hang onto clapped out old stuff ‘for ever’ and never send it off for recycling, how do you expect new stuff to be manufactured and enter the marketplace? When that process slows down or stops, that’s why factories close and jobs are lost, which is one of the reasons why the closure of a large Peugeot factory outside Paris has just been announced. Old 1994 cars are NOT worth 2000€ as sellers here would have you believe – in most cases they are only fit for the scrap-heap and recycling, allowing people to be employed building new ones so the process can start all over again.

But getting back to my table and chairs, my first port of call was therefore Ebay and what did I find? Just what I was looking for – a set of slatted wooden garden furniture comprising a folding table and four folding chairs, with arms because I just think they are important. The German seller clearly had a lot of these available so I decided what my bid limit would be and began to stalk my quarry. Time after time the French bidders (I’m pretty sure they were, because this was on Ebay France) appeared to lose their nerve and in the last few moments, the bidding went stratospheric. But eventually on a lot that finished at a weird time on a weekend, it happened and I acquired the set that I’d been waiting for. All that I had to do was wait now for delivery – and wait you have to, because for some reason over here, there’s no sense of urgency involved in getting stuff to its destination. A parcel that I’d arranged to be picked up in England on a 3-4 day delivery eventually got to me after 13 days and I had the frustration of tracking its arrival in France from England, seeing it somehow being sent to the wrong regional depot, then to the correct one and then being ‘out for delivery’ for day after day. Luckily what was inside wasn’t perishable 🙂

Eventually I got the usual call on my mobile from the delivery driver asking where my house is, and the two parcels were delivered. I cut them open with eager anticipation only to find that one of the rather attractive wooden chairs had a chunk sliced off one of the back uprights, which set me back a bit. Then came the assembly of the table. All went well until I came to attach the last of the three slats that run underneath the length of the table between the legs and, despite taking lots of care, when I inserted the securing screws at each end, first one end split and then the other.

My initial reaction was that I’d have only the slimmest chance of getting these problems sorted out with me contacting a German supplier in French, but it turned out that my fears were totally groundless. I took several pictures and after a few emails back and forth, during which I said that no, I didn’t want to return everything for a refund because despite the problems I liked the stuff a lot, it went quiet. Then a couple of days ago a parcel arrived containing a new, replacement chair. The driver said that he wasn’t expecting a pick up to return the damaged one but that he didn’t have a replacement wooden table slat, which I was therefore resigned to attempting a repair on myself. I needn’t have worried. The next day, back came the same driver with another package, this time containing replacements for all three table slats, two longer ones and one short one.

So what a fabulous supplier Deuba in Germany turned out to be! I already had enjoyed several evenings sitting out at my table and chairs, in the evening, sipping a cold drink until the darkness fell (or until the sneaky little biting insects became too much to bear 😐 ). Now that I’ve fixed the wood on my table my pleasure is even greater and when I’ve carried out a little fibreglass filler repair on the damaged chair back, so I’ll have five chairs around my table rather than four and can look forward with anticipation to having them filled in the not too far distant future with family and friends, my pleasure will be even greater.

I find that now that I have more time, the smaller, simpler things of life can and do give me great pleasure. Maybe it’s because now I allow them too, whereas before I didn’t, I don’t know.

To finish off, here’s a pic of me that was taken an hour or so ago, before I typed this post. And there’s Toddie too, enjoying the shade under the lime tree with me.

Well, first and foremost, it’s time to get My Trike back on track. A lot has been happening over recent weeks to do with things, people, my house and my new life here and I haven’t posted about any of it.

First, one small but rather sad event. Readers may recall that I mentioned the little brown mouse that chose to come and live with me and Toddie and made his home under my freezer. Unfortunately the little critter overstayed his welcome when he decided to come out to play every night in search of food, even though after I found he’d had the cheek to nibble at a nectarine I’d left out and the seal of a tin of chocolate biscuits (it’s a long story, my son bought them for my mother for Christmas and they ended up down here with me…), everything he might be interested in was safely packed away in plastic containers. Trouble was while he was out searching, he was leaving little calling cards everywhere – yes everywhere – that his search was taking him too, meaning that I was spending the first part of every morning cleaning up after him. And the agile little devil was so clever too – I still can’t work out how he managed to climb onto a table with shiny legs and an overhanging top, but Tarzan-like, he did.

So regrettably the time came to deal with him. From the number and volume of calling cards he was leaving, he must have been getting food from somewhere, so the only conclusion I could come to was that he was going out during the day and sneaking back in when my back was turned. This was more or less confirmed one day when I was sitting at the computer in the kitchen and saw him bold as you like strolling across the kitchen floor! So I jumped up and grabbed the broom in a Mrs Mop kind of way and the mouse, seeing this tore and hid round behind the mop bucket. I bashed the bucket with the broom in a gladiatorial kind of way and the mouse then shot out sideways under the sink where the two gas cylinders stand. I was ready for him. As he tried to race out from behind the left hand one in a desperate attempt to make for the freezer, I expertly parried with the broom and blocked his passage. He then spun round and dashed back behind the mop bucket, so I gave it another thwack with the broom and out he shot again for a repeat performance.

This happened a couple more times but when it comes to mouse speed and agility, man with broom is ultimately no match and on his final attempt he managed to do a crafty flip and twist that left me standing and allowed him to reach the freezer. But in doing so, he only increased my resolve as in the final event, man will not be beaten in the mouse stakes. And so it was that I ordered a couple of humane traps off Ebay but with three more killer-snappers as back up just in case my adversary didn’t get the message.

Things didn’t start off well when on their arrival, I found that one of the humane jobbies was missing its end cap, rendering it useless in the mouse capture and containment stakes. Nevertheless, I tried making and sticking a cardboard replacement for the missing part, stuck a lump of choice Camembert in it (of which more some other time…. YUMMM!) and plonked it down next to the freezer. Well dang me, I was in another room when I heard a sound and returned to see that the trap door (no, not the trapdoor…) had fallen, presumably trapping the little wretch inside. Success!

Er, no. When I checked, the little rodent had expertly removed the Camembert and escaped with it and was now enjoying a fine meal at my expense. Not deterred by this, which I concluded had to have been a total fluke, I did the same with the other humane trap and put it the other side of the freezer. In the morning I checked it and once again, the trap door had fallen and once again the little thief had nicked the cheese and taken it off. So I’m afraid that there was nothing else for it but to bring the big guns into action. It was a sad decision to have to make because I confess that I don’t like killing anything for no real reason. After all, what difference does one less mouse make in the whole scheme of things, so why not try to catch him and free him down the road, next to someone else’s house so he doesn’t come back to mine 🙂

But now I had no choice. Later that evening I set one of the snapper-traps with a large lump of smelly cheese from the Auvergne (at least I thought he’d go out in a bit of style) and within less than half an hour, there was a loud snap that made me jump. And when I got up to check, there was little mousey. I think he had a quick death but I can’t say that I feel any sense of triumph about it. I would have been happier to have caught and released him, but it wasn’t to be and sadly, things couldn’t go on as they were.

It’s lovely getting up to a clean kitchen and food area, but on balance I don’t think the world is a better place for having one less little brown mouse in it 😐

I went back to the bank in Montignac this morning to pick up my new ‘carnet de cheques’ and bank card, but no dice. The computer system was down. ‘Come back this afternoon’, the nice chap in the foyer said. So I did. System still down – he was apologetic but couldn’t do anything without reference to ‘the system’. So still no cheque book, bank card and, last but not least, hair cut! I’m beginning to look like the mad professor so I hope that normal service is resumed at the bank tomorrow or else desperate measures may be called for! ‘Why not just get a haircut?’ you may ask. The reason is that the collection of euros in my pocket is now at a low ebb and I need to hang onto it, just in case, until I can bolster it by access to an ATM 😕

Just came back to add this next little bit – while I was getting ready for bed, I came out of the bathroom just in time to see the little brown mouse shoot across the kitchen floor and go under the freezer. So he’s still indoors – can’t blame him because it’s been very cool and showery and we had such a powerful storm today that for a short time there was a little river running down past my back door. I just hope that things start getting back to ‘normal’ soon because although I don’t want to fry, these low temperatures are beginning to get me down a bit 🙁

Wow – I knew it had been some time since my last post but I hadn’t realised it was that long! I’ve kept meaning to do some updates but there have been lots of reasons why I’ve been unable to. The worst was that the PC I was using when I first came to France (my No. 2 machine, my No. 1 having died a death just a week or so before I moved house) also let me down and quite honestly, my old Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop just doesn’t cut it nowadays for anything very much beyond picking up emails and a bit of Internet browsing. And even that was doing the usual irritating Windows thing of not loading up all its services on boot up, making it even more frustrating than usual to use. So now I’m actually using my No. 3 machine which I had to fire up and format after the (partial) death of No. 2, whose hard drive I had to protect at all costs because of the valuable data it contained. Mission accomplished, by the way I’m glad to say.

But anyway, here goes. Because I’m covering such a long period of time in this post, I think it’d be better if I do it in a kind of diary format.

Monday 21st May

I was expecting the electricity company to drop in today to connect me up but by lunch time there was still no sign of them. I must have (ahem…) dropped off and was having a quiet doze after my lunch when I was awoken by a loud rap on the back window! I nearly jumped out of my skin, and sure enough, it was them. Well, they did the usual things that electric guys have to do to get the power switched on and I was slightly alarmed when at one point he said that the trees were interfering with the incoming overhead cable and needed lopping. For a moment I thought he meant that he couldn’t go ahead but I needn’t have worried. After 45 minutes or so when they left I had power. It was lovely to be able to flick switches and have lights come on – one of the simpler pleasures that you take for granted in the modern world and only miss when you can’t do it. And as for having power in the wall sockets so I could plug in things like the vacuum cleaner, fridge, freezer and microwave, well that was almost pure luxury 😉

Tuesday 22nd May

The man from Veolia came to turn on my water this morning. What a nice name that is – so much better than ‘The South East Water Company’ where I came from in Kent. Makes you immediately think that the water is bound to be so much purer and better for you, which it has to be compared to the miserable, chalk-filled apology that South East Water has the nerve to charge good money for, that furs up your kettle in a matter of weeks and chokes you when you make tea with it if you don’t use a filter or water-softener. But I’m getting side-tracked. The man from Veolia was middle-aged and slightly portly in clean brown overalls. He was wearing small, brass-rimmed round glasses and if you met him in other circumstances you could easily think that he’d be an academic or possibly an accountant. But no, here he was to turn on my water. We greeted each other and chatted a little bit. He took an eye to Toddie and asked what breed he was and I explained that he is a ‘Springer Spaniel’ in English and is a retired ‘chien de chasse’, a hunting dog, as my stepson trained him for when he used to go shooting birds. But now I explained, we are two old dogs together, both retired. He smiled and said he recognised the name of the breed, although I don’t know for sure if it’s the same in French, the way that ‘King Charles Spaniel’ is. He had the water flowing in a matter of moments. What we mere mortals hadn’t understood is that there is a second large, master ‘robbinet’ known only to the pros which he located almost instantly with an electronic device like a mine detector that bleeps. As soon as he uncovered it and turned it with his special large red key, the water began flowing immediately. Literally. The outside tap had been left open as had one or two inside the house which operate in the opposite way to what I’m used to 🙂 After I’d dashed around turning everything off, I went back out to my new friend and said, in French, ‘It’s like a miracle’. He looked back at me and replied, ‘No, it’s not’, just like that, in the laconic way that the French are masters of.

With the water sorted, that meant I could go to the SFR Shop in Perigueux to see if I could arrange for telephone and Internet to be connected at the house. Only problem was that I didn’t have a clue where the SFR Shop was and had no way of finding out without, yes, you’ve got it…… an Internet connection. But no matter! This is France and we are here to engage with folks, so Toddie and I jumped into the car and off we went together for our first trip to Perigueux. We ended up parking the car right in front of Perigueux’s best know landmark – the Byzantine style cathedral with three domes. What a treat, and parking appeared to be free – at least I didn’t see anywhere to pay, anyway. In the UK you’d have paid a small fortune to park in a position like this but here I just pulled up in a parking space and that was that. I left Toddie in the back seat and off I went. Almost the first person I spotted was a skin-head looking type pushing a bike and I asked him if he knew where the SFR Shop was. ‘Of course’, he said, very politely, and directed me to go straight ahead and ask again a bit further on, as it was a little distance away. In the UK you mightn’t have been surpised to get a couple of grunts from a guy who looked like this, but not here – he couldn’t have been more friendly and helpful. I did as he said and a bit further on in the old town centre I asked a chap behind a snack stand the same question. Same response – he told me to keep going in the same direction and ask again a bit further on. So I did. When I emerged onto a busy main thoroughfare, I stopped a young chap hurrying in the opposite direction and asked him the same question. He thought for a moment and then beamed, saying, ‘Yup, it’s just over there in that row of shops’. And then he smiled again and was off on his business.

I arrived outside the SFR Shop and it was all closed and shuttered up. I couldn’t believe it until I read the opening times on the door – closed from 12.30 until 2.00pm. This was slap-bang in the dreaded lunch hour! I’d forgotten how important the lunchtime ritual is here. So I amused myself for a half hour or so, sitting opposite in the now warm breeze (we’d had some very chilly days leading up to today) watching the world go by. When the shutters lifted, I followed another couple of people into the shop and when it was my turn, I explained what I wanted – the home package with unlimited telephone calls and Internet included. And that’s when the fun started. In rural France, there are no such things as house numbers. There are road names, which often describe the locality rather than the road itself, but Mr Le Factuer then knows every resident in the area individually by name, which you have on your mail box, rather than anonymously by house number. I like that – so much more personal – but unfortunately the software used by the SFR Shop assistant was probably written by someone in Paris who doesn’t appreciate such niceties and kept insisting on having both street name and house number before allowing him to proceed. He managed to find a way through the minefield eventually and showed me that the package I wanted would come out at a monthly cost of €36.90. ‘OK’, I said. ‘But’, he said, ‘If I booked it tomorrow, there would be a ‘special promo’ costing only €29.90 per month! So I said, ‘OK, book me that one’. ‘I can’t’, he said, ‘Not until tomorrow!!’

Now who, you might think, would possibly start a marketing promo on a Wednesday, moreover one that isn’t even on a special date? Goodness knows, nobody in my experience that’s for sure, but in any case it meant that I’d have to go back to Perigueux the following day and do the whole the thing all over again!

Later on, on the way home, I dropped into the supermarket. Now that I could connect up my fridge and freezer, I thought I might pick up a few things to put in them. Being a male, on top of the list was a pack of cold beer, which I hadn’t been able to enjoy since coming to France because the local supermarket just stacks it on the shelves and doesn’t chill it. Now guys, tell me this. Where else could you buy 30 x 25cl bottles (24 plus 6 ‘gratuit’) of ’33’ Export beer for only €7.48? DON’T YOU JUST HAVE TO LOVE THIS COUNTRY?

Wednesday 23rd May

Back to the SFR shop in Perigueux in the morning to sign up for my Internet and phone package – and back yet again in the afternoon. As soon as we started the first time, I realised that I’d left my passport and proofs of address behind and had to go back to get them. When I first started driving from Plazac to Perigueux, I needed the satnav. Now I can tell the satnav lady about the little errors she makes along the way where there have been small changes in road layouts etc. Showing off or what?

Thursday 24th May

I bought two cylinders of gaz (butane as they’re to be kept indoors) at the Shopi and a regulator at the Brico in Rouffignac and connected one up under the sink to the old wall-mounted water heater. It began working instantly once I’d mastered the art of starting up the pilot light. Hot water on demand at the sink, hand basin and bath meant that my level of luxury was dramatically increased! I didn’t have a proper cooker yet, of course, but I did have a camping kitchen that had been in my loft since the late 1980s. I set it up and found a plastic ‘T’ in my microlight fuel box that I used to connect in the camping stove to the gas supply, which I immediately tested out by making a pot of tea. Lovely, it went down an absolute treat. This is the life 😀

Sunday 27th May

Things tend to move on slowly in France. In the late afternoon, I was sitting in the car in Montignac outside a hotel using their free internet connection as although I now had electricity, water, gas in a cylinder and hot water, I didn’t yet have a phone line/Internet. The engineer was due to come on 1st June and the Internet was due to be connected within 48 hours or so afterwards. It was 16.40 local time and the car temperature gauge read 31.5 deg C which was a bit different to how it had been up to the day before. The house was now not feeling so damp inside 😉 but was still somewhat cool. Now I had sorted out the services, I could get back to the house cleaning but first I had to finish repairing MYRO’s wing covers that were damaged by winds weeks ago back in the UK and get them on. The reason was that the UV level had to be very high and could do damage to stuff like stitching. The dog was with me and although I had stripped his long hair the day before, he was feeling the heat. I’m glad to say that he seems happy here, which is a relief.

The next door neighbour had arrived back the previous evening having been away for the week, leaving their Internet switched off. I was hoping they’d be here for the coming week as it would be great to have an easily accessible Internet connection until I got my own as for starters Skype is much cheaper for calling the UK than either of my two (French and English) mobiles. I had bought a French mobile last week, put €15 on it, made one (longish) call to a friend in the UK and it was all gone immediately 😐

Jean Claude, my neighbour on the other side, whose family have lived in the same house since the 1600’s, did me a great service the day before by coming in with a tractor with a mower on it, as he said he would when we had met earlier in the week, and chopped down all the grass in the front and rear of my house. I had told him how grateful I was and he simply said that that’s what neighbours do around here. When I got back from using the Internet in Montignac, I had spotted Jean Claude in his garden next door and when I went across to see him he had introduced me to Chantalle, his wife. What lovely people they both are and I think I’m very lucky to have them as neighbours.

Here’s something else that reallysurprised me! I was sitting outside using my laptop, in the afternoon and I spotted a snake almost a metre long slither past my car and into the brush next to where I was sitting. When I asked Jean Claude about it, he told me that there are hundreds of them in the grass around here 😕 I asked if it was dangerous (thinking more of Toddie than me) and he said that it wasn’t if it was a metre long. It’s the little buggers that you need to look out for – they are vipers which are venomous. But there you go, it’s the same with them in the UK. Even so I’m not used to seeing snakes right outside my back door 😐

More on the local wildlife. I brought a few old DVDs with me to play on my laptop in the evenings to tide me over until I’ve got things more organised with satellite and a TV. Just a few minutes after I’d had breakfast I was checking a couple out that hadn’t played properly and out of the corner of my eye I saw a little brown shape nip out under the open door of my bathroom, whose entrance is off my kitchen, and into the stuff I’ve got piled on the floor under the table. Toddie had found a little dead mouse or vole a couple of days before and I guess it was one of them. It came as a bit of a shock coming from the UK where having something like that running round your house would be totally unacceptable and lead to a call for traps to be laid all around to get rid of the little varmint. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised as here my kitchen door leads straight in from the outside and if any little critter wants to, it can just walk in when my back’s turned. Looks like there’s going to have to be a little bit of live-and-let-live around here – and making sure that there’s not too much stuff lying around that the little chaps like this would like to get their teeth into 🙂

Friday 1st June

The SFR engineer came on the dot! He had phoned first on my new SFR mobile to ask directions (old problem – no house numbers, see…) and when he arrived, he thanked me for them. Nice chap! While he worked, I said that I’d heard that the Internet runs very slowly in these parts. ‘Oh no’, he said, ‘You’ll get over 2000 KB/s!’ Blimey, I was getting over 4700 KB/s back in the UK (but paying for 8000 of course), and that was slow enough. Going back to 2000 KB/s would be a real step backwards, but there was no choice 🙁 At the end of all his efforts, despite the ’48 hour’ thing, I had both phone and Internet working. He made me sign the job sheet and showed me my new number before he left. It took me a little while to configure my new SFR Neuf box that connects you to the Internet and also gives you a home wi-fi signal, TV and an open public unsecured wireless connection the same as my neighbour’s one that I’d been using on and off up to then. My old Philips DECT set that I’d brought with me from the UK worked a treat but I couldn’t get it to ring when I dialled in, even after I’d gone through the diagnostics in the Neuf box. The reason was actually very simple – my real telephone number was totally different to the one shown on the paperwork! The local area code is 0553 but my number starts with 0524. I have no idea what that is the area code for but I was reminded yet again that you shouldn’t let anything in France surprise you 😉

Tuesday 5th June

While the UK was enjoying its second day of the Jubilee Bank Holiday, I was off to Perigueux (Trellisac actually) to the Brico Depot there to check out the kitchen designs. I found the one I like and will almost certainly fit, the Mila in genuine ash. While I was there I bought a glass shower screen for the bath (a ‘pare baignoire’), a bathroom cabinet and a pair of lights for the landing (one of the existing ones was missing).

Wednesday 6th June

Fitted the shower screen today. Hurray! Now I could have showers whenever I wanted without having to worry about water flying all over the floor. Not quite actually, as at 80cm, it could do with being a bit longer and also there is a gap along the bottom that allows water squirted directly at it to go underneath and onto the floor! But never mind, these issues will be overcome somehow or other.

Thursday 7th June

I’d bought a complete bathroom kit, consisting of toilet roll holder, towel rail, soap dish, toothbrush holder etc when I got the gaz cylinders from the Brico at Rouffignac and today I fitted it together with the bathroom cabinet I got from the Brico Depot. It was a great feeling having something like a proper bathroom. It’s all to do with making the place into a home I think.

Well, that more or less brings everything up to date. A few days ago, I received notification from my new French bank of the pin number of my new bank card so I thought I’d nip into Montignac today to pick up the card and my new cheque book, which together will make day to day living so much simpler and less expensive. Up to now, I’ve been using my UK bank card which incurs a heavy exchange rate loss and a foreign transaction charge each time I use it so being able to use my French account will avoid much of that. I also thought I’d get my first French haircut while I was there. I found that unlike in the UK, the bank doesn’t actually open on Mondays. Why should I have been surprised? So I think I’ll try again tomorrow, and also get my haircut at the same time 🙂

After getting everything in order and making a ferry booking for Tuesday evening, I left the house where I’d been staying for nearly two weeks to pick up Toddie, my dog. My step son had been looking after him since I left to take my furniture and belongings to France and I’d also arranged for my son to be there as it could be several months before I see either of them again. I then drove down to Dorset to see my mother who lives there with my sister and brother-in-law, and after sleeping on the floor on the Monday night and spending the following day with my mother, Toddie and I left to catch the ferry late on Tuesday afternoon. So we left England for our new home in France on 15th May 2012.

I was determined to avoid the tiredness problems that I’d experienced before, the more so as I was now driving a faster vehicle anyway and time was not therefore an issue. So my plan was to drive for two or three hours to get away from northern France and then pull up for the night in a rest area. So that’s what we did, and what a strange experience this led to. The rest areas have trucks parked up in them with their drivers resting at all times of the day and at night, of course, almost all of them are packed, as was the one we stopped at. In the early hours I was suddenly awoken by a truck horn blaring out and a lot of powerful lights being switched on. I looked out of my car to see two or three guys in the lorry park with balaclava masks on who had been stealing diesel fuel by siphoning it out of the tanks of the parked trucks and in doing so had disturbed one of the drivers. They had a small white van and while the others ran to jump into it, one of the thieves made an intimidating gesture at the driver whose truck he was in front of. But he’d totally underestimated who he was dealing with. The driver promptly jumped out with a baseball bat and my gosh, you should have seen that villain run! He only just made it to his van and for a while the driver sprinted after it waving his baseball bat in the air. Luckily for the thieves, they made it to the exit before he caught up with them. If not, I think there may have been a case of a few busted heads that night 🙂

But that wasn’t the end of it. It seems that all of those long-distance truck drivers who sleep in their cabs take their trousers off before retiring. Well, by this time the first driver had been joined by about 10 others and all to a man totally trouserless. What a sight as they all discussed what had happened and spent the next half an hour or so checking their fuel tanks – still with no trousers on. It’s something that’ll stick in my mind for a very long time to come, let me tell you 😆

Toddie and I arrived here in Plazac last Wednesday afternoon but it certainly isn’t plain sailing just yet. We stayed in the new house without services of any kind after picking up the keys and arranging with the agent’s assistance (thank you, Sandrine…) to have electricity, water, phone and internet connected. I don’t know when the last two will go on but I was told that water would be reconnected on the following Friday and electricity on Monday, tomorrow. However, as this is France, the water guys didn’t arrive as promised so I still don’t have any water and do not know when they might arrive to switch it on even, as the appointment was made by the estate agent and they weren’t open on Saturday (I went and checked just to make sure they weren’t there and just not answering their phone 😉 )

But all is not lost – both of my closest neighbours are great. To the rear I have a middle-aged couple from Bordeaux who will be here only until the end of today as theirs is a holiday home. The grass has grown so much that the poor chap has spent the whole of his time since I’ve been here mowing it – with just a few stops now and again for the odd glass of wine I think. I find his wife quite easy to understand and hold a conversation with but less so him for some reason. His accent I find a tad difficult at present – unless it’s the vin rouge of course (his or mine I do not know…) – but I think it will all become easier in time. The neighbours to my left are a brilliant bunch of young French people – guys and girls, about 10 or possibly more I think as they have a house-full plus several tents in the garden – who I think are musicians and have a contract in the area (as I understood it) for 1 year from September. They have been a life saver – after being desperate for water and even washing in bottled stuff from the supermarket, I can now get all I need from them from an outside tap. And they’ve also given me the code for their wi-fi which I can receive either from outside or my bedroom windows. They are a lovely bunch of youngsters, so very friendly and I’m very lucky for them to give me their help without question as they have done, so typical of the majority of the French people, I’ve always found.

I’ve got a generator that I brought from England (fortunately) that I use to run a light, charge my laptop and run a fan heater downstairs from time to time, like now, as it’s a bit chilly and stormy, will remain so until about next Tuesday or Wednesday and the house hasn’t had a chance to warm up inside just yet. I can’t really do anything except get by until I get water and electricity as the house needs cleaning throughout very badly. I can’t use the toilet as it’s full of spiders etc and needs a lot of water down it to clean it out. I’ll say no more except I now know what it was like for the pioneers who opened up the wild west 😉 Lucky I have a sense of humour – and a lot of bushes eh.

But there have been compensations, of course. Alan, an old friend of mine of 81 suffered a stroke a few months ago. I dropped in on him to see how he was and say, ‘Au revoir’, on the Saturday before I left England. He made me the kind gift of a litre of J & B Rare Scotch Whisky and I promised him that on my first night in Plazac I’d toast my arrival and his future health in it. So that’s what I did and much I enjoyed it too. Here’s to you and Margaret, Alan, and may things soon get better for both of you.

I’ve got the local supermarket run sorted out now and before I’d got my own out of ‘the cave’ where I’d put it, Bob helped me out with a single burner stove which has been a useful addition. Talking about compensations and the supermarket, a couple of evenings ago, I bought a bottle of Bordeaux there, Chateau Du Bosc 2010 for just €2.95, that turned out to be really excellent. Last night I thought I’d risk it and go for a bog standard bottle of Appellation Bordeaux Controlee ‘plonk’ for €1.55 and had some with my lunch today of baguette, saucisson de porc fumee and pate de campagne. And do you know what, it was pretty good 😀 They have always said that the French keep the best of their wines for themselves and export the rest and I think there could be some truth in that.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I don’t expect to see much of Bob for a while unfortunately as he has some other priorities to occupy him, but I’m very self-sufficient and will get by as I’ve done so far since I arrived. My next purchase early next week will be a heavy duty motorized grass cutter and brush clearer so I can get cracking outside. The greenery is way above the window sills – I’ll post some pics soon so you can see what I mean. In the meantime I shall be exhorting the weather gods to do something about the cold and rain that I’ve been on the receiving end of almost non-stop since arriving here. The car thermometer went up to 26 degrees on one day but that now seems like a distant memory. I just want it to get back up there before I start on the job of cleaning the house as it will take a lot of water, all of which will then need to dry out again. What’s the opposite of a rain dance?

My move to France has taken so long that when I turned up at the last couple of Medway club meetings, people did a double-take and said, ‘You still here?’ And it happened again today when I went into Stoke with Peter for a final flight (for a few months at least anyway…) in the X’air. But this time it was for real and I was sad to think that I won’t be seeing the old gang again, possibly for quite a while. I’ll miss the customary jokes, banter, insults and leg-pulling and all the little things that make you feel that you’re part of a club. So until the next time, thanks to Chris and Karen, Slip and Claire, Tony and Rosemary, Sue and Steve, Pam, Blow Job, John, Andrew, Paul and Sarah, Kirk, Roger and Roger, Popey, Gary, young Blair and all the other members whose names I’ve missed or forgotten to include. It was great knowing you all and I hope I get the chance to see you all again some time before too long. Until then keep making sure that you fly safe 😉

Things have become pretty fraught over recent weeks due to the intransigence of the seller of my new house in Plazac and their refusal to complete the sale in a timely manner. Since returning from France over a week ago I have been dependent on the generosity of a friend who has allowed me to ‘camp’ inside a house that they own on more or less an open-ended basis until I am able to make the final move to France. I’ve also not seen Toddie my dog since I left my old house in the truck on April 26th as I could not have him with me and didn’t want to upset him by letting him see me and then having to leave him again. So one way and another the past couple of weeks have not been any kind of a picnic 🙁

Well, at last after applying increasing pressure on the estate agent in France, who had assured me that such problems would not arise and then seemed incapable of effectively dealing with them when they did, early this evening I received the telephone call from him that I wanted to hear. This was that so long as I took out comprehensive buildings insurance at a cost of €30/month, I could now move into the property whenever I wanted to. So now I can make plans to tie everything up here in the UK and I think that I’ll then be able to get down to Plazac probably by Wednesday next week. One of the reasons for there being a small delay is because I want to see my mum before I go. She’s 93 this month and it could be a few months before I see her again, so I must make the trip down to Dorset, where she’s living with my sister, before I go.

But at least I can now see a light at the end of this particular tunnel, which quite honestly, could not have come too soon 😐

Well, I’ve been back in the UK since last Monday night during which I ended up sleeping in the cab of a truck, but more about that in a moment. The run-up to my house move on 26th April was a bit traumatic and incredibly tiring. For weeks beforehand I’d been de-cluttering and disposing of unwanted stuff by selling what I could on eBay, giving items away on Freecycle.org and, as a last resort, throwing stuff away at the local tip. Even then, as the moving day loomed on which I had to quit my old house, of course, there still seemed so much to pack or get rid of.

I’d reserved a 7.5 ton self-drive truck with a tail-lift for a week to get all the stuff I wanted to take with me down to Plazac and decided beforehand that I’d pick it up and load it the day before the move so as to relieve some of the pressure on me. What I didn’t account for was that despite the best laid plans, I’d be driving around the countryside for some of that time getting paperwork signed by my ex-wife and delivered to my solicitor in time to get the completion through and that I’d still as a result end up under tremendous time pressure.

I was incredibly grateful to receive the help of my mate Ken on the Wednesday who took me over to pick up the truck and then spent the whole of the day right up until the early evening helping me pack boxes and load them and the large, heavy items of furniture and kitchen appliances I was taking with me, into it for the journey south. I could never have done it by myself and I can’t thank him enough for all he did. I totally underestimated the number of boxes that I needed. I had previously got 17 large, strong boxes off eBay and thought they would be enough. In fact I had to get another 10 locally, that were even larger, together with 2 more rolls of bubble-wrap and ended up using all of them too! And all the time while we ferried stuff from house to truck it rained and rained 😐

On the Thursday I had the help of my son Brad. By that time I was beginning to flag and Brad did me the enormous favour of blindly throwing stuff away into ‘rubbish’ without showing it to me or worrying very much what it was! I needed that by then, actually. Colin the ‘white van man’ who took away the rubbish probably thought he’d struck treasure trove with a lot of the stuff he took away – more than 2 Transit vans-full – but I don’t begrudge him that in any way as he did it all for me as a favour and did me a great service as a result.

Late on Thursday afternoon Ashley, my buyer, and I ended up with our respective solicitors on hands-free on our mobile phones talking to each other to agree what they needed to get the completion done that day and I’m glad to say that they succeeded. I don’t think it would have happened though if we hadn’t resorted to forcing them to talk directly in the way that we did 😀

Come the Thursday afternoon and I still hadn’t booked a Channel crossing for the truck because of all the uncertainty. Because of the size and weight of the vehicle, I had to go out and back as a freight booking which meant going via Norfolk Line, which is now part of DFDS. I did the booking on my laptop and waited for the confirmation before finally packing my printer. It didn’t come and luckily I decided to phone DFDS to find out what was going on. They had no record of the booking but luckily we managed to sort it out and finally I was able to do my print out.

I’d hoped to get away by about 4pm on Thursday for a 10.45pm booking but it wasn’t to be just because of the sheer volume of stuff that I still needed to clear out. Brad worked tirelessly and I eventually managed to get away just after 10.00pm and then only because Ashley came round and kicked me out in the nicest possible way saying that he would get rid of the rubbish that I’d be leaving behind and that I didn’t have to bother. So thanks for that, Ashley.

I was much too late for my ferry booking of course, and was concerned that when I got to Dover, DFDS might hold me back for ages until they could get me on another one. I needn’t have worried though, because their service was impeccable on both the outgoing and the return crossings, the latter of which I also had to get reorganised at short notice, as I’ll explain later. I was loaded onto the 2.30am Dover to Calais ferry and drove out of the port the other side in the pitch dark at something like 5.30am local time. That was when I made my first, and I’m glad to say, only major cock up 🙁

I already had the route programmed into my sat nav from my previous trip down to Plazac so off I went. Unfortunately I’d failed to notice that for some reason the device had dropped its ‘recalculate automatically when off route’ setting and I put down the absence of the lady’s otherwise helpful advice to the fact that I was on the right route. I got a couple of indications that maybe things were not quite as they should have been. The first was that the ‘arrival time at destination’ shown on my sat nav was constantly increasing and this did slightly alarm me, but I thought that this might be down to it being so early in the journey. However, shortly after when the dawn began to come up, it was pretty obvious that the increasing brightness was far too much on my nose! And sure enough, it was, as then I began to see road signs indicating that Belgium was just down the road!

Now I hear you say, how can you possibly be so daft as to end up going totally the wrong way out of Calais, and let me tell you that it’s very easy at that time of the day, in pitch darkness, driving a large, unfamiliar diesel truck! I had been following the signs west towards Dunkirk but what I’d then done was miss a clover leaf at a road junction. And once you’ve done something like that, you don’t get many chances to rectify the mistake as there aren’t that many places where you can leave the road you’re on and turn round. But I did eventually and fortunately not a lot of harm was done as the actual mileage involved was not that great. And once I’d checked and reset the sat nav, off I went again. But this time, instead of taking me on my preferred route to the west, avoiding Paris, because of where I was starting from, I had no choice but to follow where my sat nav led me, south around the eastern side of Paris on the dreaded Peripherique 😐

The Peripherique at rush hour in the rain in a very large diesel truck is not the most attractive proposition, but it didn’t turn out to be too bad. Amazingly, apart from a small minority who seemed to have some kind of death wish and thought that it was quite OK to cut into the stopping distance in front of a very large truck at short notice, most drivers afforded me and the other much larger trucks that I found myself amongst, the respect they deserved. The constant stop-start was a little bit tedious but after a while I emerged on the south of the city and was able to continue my journey south.

Diesel fuel is much cheaper in France than in the UK but even so, the cost when I came to fill up further south was a shock to the credit card. And as I’d decided to keep to the autoroutes to save time, the additional peage costs also soon began to add up. But no matter, driving myself was still considerably cheaper than doing the move any other way and I just had to swallow whatever of such costs were thrown at me. And there were quite a few, let me tell you. I seemed to be constantly stopping and jumping out of my cab to run around to the left of the vehicle and stuff my card into yet another peage machine for the next bit of my journey south 🙂

Apart from stopping for fuel and to grab the odd snack, I drove constantly all day. The truck had a speedometer marked in km/hr and was governed like all the others in France to a speed of 90. This meant that you couldn’t build up speed on a down-grade so you could whizz up the other side. Instead, because of the weight on board, I was constantly changing down whenever I got to even the slightest up-hill stretch and was even being overtaken by some of the many giant trucks with trailers that had the power to pass me, sometimes at a mere snail’s pace that kept them alongside me for a minute or more! I felt like a real trucker at the end of it 😆

The day began to catch up with me, though, some distance south of the city of Limoges. By then my eyes were feeling very heavy and although I’d been on the mobile and given Bob an ETA, after I’d nodded off at the wheel three times, just for a moment each time mind, I knew it was time to stop for a break. I pulled into one of the many rest areas that you find every few kilometres along the major roads in France, arranged my sleeping bag under my back to give me a little bit of something to lie on and fell asleep within seconds.

I woke up after about an hour to the sound of my sat nav lady announcing that she was ‘recalculating route’ and after a brief trip to the loo, hit the road once more. The short break had done wonders for me and it didn’t seem that long before I was calling Bob up at Montignac to tell him when I’d be arriving at the house. We met up and all that was left for me to do that Friday was to park up ready to unload the next day. Unfortunately, because of my tiredness and carelessness, I managed to touch the guttering when reversing the truck into position in front of the house, but luckily the damage was not that great and will be easily fixed when I get in for good.

Saturday 28th April was a very productive day, despite it being cool, dull and damp, unseasonably so for the Dordogne at this time of the year. I had to sign some final papers at the estate agent’s in Montignac and open a French bank account. Then we managed to get in to see a new notaire who will hopefully be able to get behind the seller’s existing one, who is useless quite frankly and a total disaster, to push the purchase forward so I can get into the house as soon as possible. Having done that, Bob and Jude then gave me a hand to unload my stuff off the truck into the house which, as it had taken two days to load up, surprisingly only took a few hours to get off. And that was after Jude had very kindly given the inside of the house a clean-through as well, using stuff Bob and I had had bought at the local Leclerc supermarket a bit earlier.

In my plans, I’d allowed a couple of days for this so that left Sunday 29th April free. Bob and I went up to the piste so I could check MYRO, which was fine despite the large amount of rain that had fallen in recent days. Its wheels were invisible, though, because of the length of the grass and after strimming around MYRO quite a bit, Bob gave me a go to finish off. I’ve not used a petrol strimmer before and I now know that I’ll have to get one to clear the grass and scrub in my garden when I move in.

My original plan was to start the drive home on Tuesday 1st May but it seemed pointless to delay when I’d done everything I’d needed to. So I decided to leave on the Monday and return the truck on the Tuesday morning rather than on the Wednesday that the hire company had said would be OK. This time I did head around to the west of Paris, although funnily enough on a different route to the one I’d taken before, and having learnt the lessons from the outward journey, this time I stopped and rested three times when I felt tiredness overtaking me. DFDS were totally un-fazed when I arrived at Calais a day early! In fact, they said that as the departing ferry had been delayed, if I hurried I’d be able to get straight on, which I did despite having my empty truck searched by the French security! I was directed straight up the ramp and while I waited for directions on where to park by the loading crew, was told just to cut my engine where I was. So I did and the ferry door was closed behind me, and mine was the last vehicle to board.

The empty truck was searched again by the UK Border people but pretty soon I was on the M2 heading towards home, but this time I had no home to go to! So I found somewhere to park up, just like all the other truckers, made myself comfortable as best I could and fell asleep in the cab with the constant rain drumming on the roof. And surprisingly, I managed about 5 hours sleep, which felt wonderful afterwards!

I’m now ‘camping out’ in an empty house owned by a friend with little by way of heating and hot water but that’ll do me fine until I can leave for France for good in, hopefully, a few days time. I’m putting pressure on the estate agent and pushing to get access to my new house in Plazac even if between them the notaires haven’t managed to complete the Acte de Vente, by paying the full amount due for the purchase and the legal fees, into my notaire’s account. I’ve been assured that it will be possible, but typically they will not say by when. My confidence in the French system has, to say the least, been somewhat dented by these experiences. I’ll let you know what happens next – when it happens 😐

I’m tired now with all the packing and clearing the house ready for the move. I’ve now got a completion date for my house sale of next Thursday 26th April and quite a few things are still up in the air. So it’s all beginning to weigh a little bit.

It’s at times like this that I need to remind myself of what it’s all about and sometimes I take another look at THE VIDEO I did on the day in February when I viewed the house in France and signed the Compromis de Vente. I soon then manage to convince myself that it’ll all be worth it in the end.

When I flew MYRO down over Easter, although I couldn’t go inside, Bob kindly drove me across to view the house again. When I first saw it, it was January and it was cold and bare looking. The next time was in February when I shot the video, and it was even colder and everything was under a blanket of snow. But now it was Spring-time and everything was looking green, fresh and inviting. Here are some of the pics I shot while I was there.

As soon as I saw the place again I knew that I still loved it and I told Bob that I had absolutely no second thoughts whatsoever. So I know that all this hard work clearing things out and de-cluttering my life really will be worth it in the long run and now I just can’t wait to get down there and start my new life.

These are some of the shots taken by Bob’s wife Jude showing MYRO’s arrival at Bob’s airfield on Easter Saturday afternoon. They start with my first go-around from the north when I was getting a feel for the approach and then show the landing, taxying in, the pilot’s relief at being back on the ground after over 8 hours of flying from the UK and finally, chewing the fat with the friends who came to meet me.

Thank you, Jude, for taking these lovely pics and letting me have them 😉

The weather reports from Bob in the Plazac area indicated that although the weather was slowly improving, there was still no point in taking off for the final leg because the cloud base at the other end would still be too low on arrival and there would also still be a chance of a few showers. Dave wanted to take Dave for a flight even though instruction wouldn’t be possible because of the local conditions and when they went off to DI the new white Quik, I got all my things together and packed, ready to stow in MYRO. I then thought I’d take a stroll down the track from the house to the piste and watch them take off. I was accompanied by one of the cats who initially ran off when I approached her but then decided to come and find me when she realised that I was walking off and ignoring her. Do you wonder how I know it was a ‘she’?

After Dave and Dave had taken off and gone haring off towards the west, the cat and I returned together back along the track to the house in warm sunshine with bushes on either side of me. All of a sudden there was gust of wind that sent a cloud of white blossom flying all around me and it made me realise that after my move, that is what I would have to look forward to for the rest of my time there in France. I have to say that it was a very good feeling!

While the Daves were away I busied myself untying MYRO and sorting my kit out and when they returned it was time to refill MYRO’s tanks. Dave asked me how much fuel I needed and I had a little think. There was still some fuel in the tanks and a bit left over in a jerry from Le Gault. I thought it prudent to allow not only for the planned flight down to Plazac but also for the slight, albeit unlikely, possibility of having to return to Wanafly if the weather at the other end turned unexpectedly sour again. I therefore decided that I ought to uplift another 40 litres of fuel.

Now, because my fuel plan had assumed that I’d only need to uplift 40 litres of fuel in total, I’d only brought 800ml of oil with me, which I’d used up at Le Gault. This was from oil that I’d bought in bulk from Lubetech many months before and which had served me so well so far. I told Dave this and was worried that because he only had 4-strokes at Wanafly, there we were on Easter Saturday and I had to get my hands on 800ml of 2-stroke oil. Dave said not to worry because he was sure he’d have some suitable oil somewhere and sure enough, he did. When he dipped into his cupboard out came….. an old opened bottle containing 850ml of Shell VSX! I knew immediately, of course, that this would be perfect for my Rotax engine 🙂

We did the usual fuel-oil mixing and when we’d finished and Dave was taking his jerries back to his hangar, with Dave’s help (no not that Dave, the other one….), I succeeded in overfilling the tanks until they just overflowed. But there was no harm done – I have to admit to having done it before when I only had the single tank – and MYRO was ready to go. There was now just time to enjoy yet another one of Mandy’s lovely meals while the weather at the other end finished clearing, this time a gorgeous fresh salad with cold meats and cheese but with only fizzy water for me while the others enjoyed beer or wine as there would be no further flying for them that day. Then after checking with Bob that all was beginning to look good enough down south, it was time to go.

Here’s a pic of the final leg of the flight from Wanafly to Plazac.

I was glad to get away but sorry to leave such good new friends behind and we said our ‘au revoirs’ by radio as I departed. As the pic above shows, Limoges Bellegarde airport, which Ryanair and Flybe both use, is just south of Wanafly and although I would be flying through their Class E airspace, I had to do a dog leg to remain clear of their Class D. I then only had to make one more course change to arrive at my final destination. But between me and it there were several large areas of high ground that I had to climb over. There was still no proper horizon and the rising ground only became visible from a fairly short distance away as it gradually appeared from the murk. And it also became quite hard work as the lift and sink associated with the terrain and scattered broken cloud took their toll. As I mentioned earlier, at times as I was approaching the rising ground, I was revving the little 503 at climb RPM (6100rpm) and ‘climbing’ at the usual 45 mph climb speed only to see the VSI still showing 3/400 fpm down! This wasn’t as bad as it sounds though, because I gave myself as much height to play with as the cloud base allowed, and before things got too close for comfort there was always then an area of lift that sent me zipping back up to 1800ft or more before it all started all over again. But it did take its toll on MYRO’s fuel burn and I was glad that I’d decided to take on the extra fuel.

And all was not sweetness and light in the vis department either. As the leg progressed and I began to catch up with the back end of the slowly departing weather front, I began to notice clumps of scud passing below me. As the cloud thickened there were more and more patches of cloud with their bases hanging down below the height I wanted to fly at. So I had no choice but to descend and as I began to do so it became apparent that the vis was rapidly drawing in again as well. Luckily by that time I’d passed the last area of high ground but still, as I approached my final destination, between Thiviers and Excideuil it came down to what I estimate was a maximum of 3000 metres and probably even a bit less for a while. But I knew from Bob’s earlier messages that this would only be temporary and it proved to be so.

As I saw the A89 autoroute and the town of Thenon appear on my satnav, not only was I clear of the poor vis but I also knew that I was almost home. This was an area that I’d already driven around quite a bit and got to know and it’s one that I’ll get to know even better over the years when my life in Plazac has got underway. Shortly afterwards when I was about 7 or so miles out, I called up on the radio and Bob’s voice came back to me. I spotted the field shortly after, which looked terribly short from where I was, and did a wide circuit to land from what I thought would be the preferred direction from the point of view of wind direction. However, I’d forgotten that there are wires at that end and it would also have been down-hill, so a go-around was called for. I then did a full circuit of the field to approach from the other direction.

While Dave (no, the other Dave from Calton Moor) and I had been talking at Wanafly, I’d said that whenever I went into a new airfield that I was unfamiliar with for the first time, I always made sure I remained high until I was sure I’d got the approach sussed even if it meant going around a couple of times. And that’s exactly what I did. In the video that Bob shot of my arrival, it looks as though I was doing a fly-by from each direction, but in fact they were go-arounds, not fly-byes. I decided to land on my second approach from the north but I could really have done with going around again because I was still a bit too high. As a result, I landed a bit too long and ended up braking like mad because I was approaching the road with the electricity poles and lines at the other end, and to be sure, I took MYRO off into the long grass to the left of the runway to bring it to a halt. I actually ended up stopping well short of the runway end but I still think it was the right thing to do in view of the weight I was carrying on board.

Bob and Jude and a couple of other friends, Regis and Wim, who Bob had already introduced me to several months previously were there to greet me and I was pleased to see them there too. We had a chat about how things had gone but there will be plenty of time for that in times to come and they helped me to unload MYRO and get it covered up as best I could with the covers I had brought with me. I then also tied MYRO down using the three concrete-filled tyres that Bob had made for me because to the west there were some large rain bearing clouds brewing and I would have hated for a little local storm to have brewed up and for MYRO to have been damaged by winds after coming all that way. Here’s the final pic showing MYRO tied down in its new home and as you can see, the sky was still quite angry.

I was glad to have arrived after all my experiences over the two days, although I would never have missed them for anything. Someone asked me a while back if I was going to trailer MYRO down and I said that the thought had never occurred to me. I said to my friends after the flight down, that MYRO would never be going back to England, not with me flying it anyway, but that’s not true. If I had to for any reason I would, but not that I expect to have to though. And I’d say to anyone thinking about venturing abroad from the UK for the first time, if you know that you’re ready for it, give a flight across the Channel into France a try. It’s not complicated or hard and is certainly well within the capabilities of the average microlight pilot, whether ‘multiaxes’ or ‘pendulaire’. If an old fart like me can do it in MYRO, when you’ve got enough experience under your belt you can certainly do it in your Quiks, Quantums and C42s. All you need to do is make sure you plan it properly and that you stay safe and within your and the aircraft’s limits. Then you can’t go wrong 😉

It had taken me longer than I thought it would to get away from Abbeville after sorting out the formalities and topping up MYRO’s tanks from my jerries. I’d had to unstrap everything that I’d packed on the right hand seat to get at them and then put it all back again when I’d finished. Initially I had poured fuel into the right hand tank and then waited for it to transfer into the second but when I had realised that this was going to take far too long, I had removed the cap from the second tank and poured fuel straight in while leaning in through the cabin door. That had done the trick and I was to repeat this each time I refuelled afterwards.

So as I was already running behind schedule, I needed to turn things around as fast as I could here at Le Gault. But as someone who I didn’t know had, after a phone call completely out of the blue from me, been kind enough to agree to get me some fuel and had, if they were still here at the strip, probably been hanging around waiting for me for something like three hours because of my delays, I couldn’t just grab the fuel and scoot off. I could see a silver VW Golf parked next to the hut at the southern end of the piste so someone was still there, thank goodness, and sure enough, after I’d landed in a bit of a skittish cross wind, as I back-tracked towards the hut a guy emerged wearing a beard and a broad smile. After I’d shut MYRO down and got out, we shook hands and he said he was amazed that I’d got in from up north at all in that vis. He didn’t speak much English but we managed OK with my French and we went into the hut and he made us a cup of coffee each (a small glass actually!) by boiling water in a small saucepan. It seems that small farm-type microlight strips are similar wherever they are!

We talked about the weather and he complained that he’d had no students because of it and had even lost a bit of aerial photographic business because of the murk. By now there was a bit of a blustery north-easterly wind blowing and the sky was blue with broken cloud when you looked straight up, but there was still a lot of horizontal haze over the surface of the land. We talked about where I was heading for and not surprisingly, as he was about 3 hours to the north, he wasn’t very familiar with the area. The time then came to make a move and we went into his small but very tidy dome-type hangar, that was by no means full but contained four or five fully rigged Tanarg and other Air Creation ‘pendulaires’. I had ended our previous phone conversation by only asking him to get me 20 litres of 95 octane fuel but in fact he had got 45, and after checking my tanks, I decided that I might as well take 40 and possibly not uplift any from Wanafly if my fuel plan worked out. In fact it didn’t, but I’ll come to that later on. I got out the oil that I’d brought with me, one of my jerries to do my fuel-oil mix in and my funnel to do the fuel transfer, and pretty soon we’d got MYRO tanked up again.

So then came the time for me to settle up and my friend produced a petrol receipt from which he’d manually deducted the cost of the 5 litres I hadn’t taken and which came to just over €66. I pulled €80 in notes out of my wallet which I gratefully offered to him for the fuel and the cost he’d incurred helping me out. He was visibly offended that I had offered him more than the amount he’d calculated. I then reduced it to €70 and insisted he took it to cover his own fuel expenses for driving to the garage and back to get me the fuel and he even turned that down until it was my turn to really insist that he did! This is absolutely typical in my experience of practically all of the French people that I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with – they couldn’t be more kind and generous and it’s one of the reasons why I’m going to be happy living among them.

So then we shook hands and I got into MYRO, fired up and was away. I did an immediate low climbing turn to the left and as I passed the hut, we waved to each other and I was gone. I still don’t know what his name was and I wonder if we’ll ever meet again?

As the vis had improved a bit, even though it was now a little more bumpy, the flight to Wanafly was pretty uneventful. I saw a couple of other aircraft flying close to one or two of the airfields shown close to my track on my satnav but that was about it. After leaving Le Gault I had to do a dog leg through a gap between the airfields at Chateaudun and Orleans Bricy to remain clear of their airspace and then I had a long straight leg down to the west of a small town called Le Blanc. Here’s a pic showing this leg of my route.

Le Blanc is a small town to the north of Wanafly. It has an airfield on its south-east side and I had therefore decided to skirt round to the west so I could remain clear of its area. As I flew past I watched a light aircraft flying in there and I found out later that Dave Lord takes students there for cross countries. After Le Blanc, I turned onto more or less a due southerly heading and was quite soon looking out for Wanafly’s runway. As before, I’d been there in both Google Earth and Google Street View (both brilliant tools!) so knew exactly what to expect, and when I spotted what looked like a runway on the right heading (12/30) just to the left of my track but just a bit ahead of my estimated arrival time, I knew it wasn’t the right place because of the positions and layout of its buildings. However, a few moments later, there was Wanafly slap bang dead on my nose. I called up on the frequency that Dave at Wanafly uses (123.55) as we’d agreed and he came back to me from a hand-held. It was a bit too broken for me to get the complete message but I knew anyway that I had to land on 12 even though there was a cross wind and even a slight tail wind component. So I descended overhead, did a fairly tight circuit avoiding neighbouring buildings and houses and landed on the runway, which is slightly up-hill in that direction. After back-tracking and taxying round to where Dave and a student from Calton Moor who was also named Dave were standing, I cut MYRO’s engine after a flight of about 2 hours 40 minutes (as I recall) from Le Gault and a total of 6 hours 40 minutes for the day flying from Stoke to Wanafly.

I then had the pleasure of enjoying the most incredible hospitality imaginable that Dave and Mandy provide at Wanafly for their students and holiday visitors. I found them to be such lovely people and just by being there, you automatically become a member of their family – along with their two big friendly dogs, the cats, the pigs and the chickens. Dave had told me beforehand that there might only be a bed in a caravan available for me but in the event I was taken up to a beautifully decorated bedroom with a lovely high ceiling and traditional exposed beams, in the attic of their converted farmhouse. After a most welcome beer and a chat about the day and my experiences, we were treated to a gorgeous meal that Mandy had prepared for us all. And as all day I’d only had the small coffee that my friend in Le Gault had given me and two small chunks of baguette with cheese in that I’d made before leaving home (and which had given me indigestion at 1500ft when I ate them between Abbeville and Le Gault) this and the red wine that Dave insisted I had with it (ahem.. 😐 ) went down a real treat, I can tell you. We then sat round talking and having a few more drinks until gone midnight and as I was then ready to crash out.

And I slept like a log, which was great as the day before I’d not got to bed until around 12.15am after finishing off all my preparations for the flight, before getting up at 5.45am to get across to Stoke.

The next morning I didn’t get up until gone 9.00 am, which is most unusual for me. Mandy showed me where everything I needed was and I was then able to enjoy a very relaxed breakfast. It was just as though I was starting a lovely holiday, but in fact I had the last leg of my flight still to do. The trouble was that although I only needed two hours or less to get down to my final destination in the Dordogne, although the weather was good enough for me to get away from Wanafly with a bit of a blustery north-easterly wind and some residual horizontal haze (so not good enough for poor Dave from Calton Moor to get up), down there it was stormy with rain and very low cloud while an occluded front was slowly passing through.

I knew all this, of course, because now that I was so close, Bob was keeping in touch regularly by phone from the Plazac area. And it became even more of a team effort when Dave checked the synoptic on his PC and told me that from the rate the front was moving, there would not be a weather window until later that afternoon when it would clear my destination before another much stronger cold front moved down quickly behind it from the north, probably arriving the next day. So there wasn’t much else I could do except ready MYRO for the flight and enjoy what Wanafly had to offer. What an awful fate…. 😉

— To be Concluded in Part 4 —

Here’s the route of the first leg from Stoke across the Channel via Dover to St Inglevert on the Cap Gris Nez and then on to Abbeville, routing around the Class D airspace around Le Touquet. The route images I’ve used in my posts here are taken from screen captures of SkyDemon (30 day trial version). I fully acknowledge their copyright in them and they clearly show the excellence of the software.

The crossing was scheduled to take 21 minutes, which it did, and I was in radio contact with Farnborough East until the FIR boundary (the dark blue line) at which point I changed over to Lille. The first Lille controller I had was male and later I was switched over to a lady. Both were polite and spoke good English albeit with a bit of an accent and I had to request that they ‘say again’ on a few occasions. They were very helpful and didn’t seem to mind, so there’s no reason for anyone doing their first crossing of ‘La Manche’ to worry in the slightest about their radio procedures.

Here’s probably the last ever picture that will be taken from MYRO in UK airspace, which shows me coasting out overhead Dover and banking to turn onto heading for the leg to Cap Gris Nez.

Abbeville came up out of the murk dead on as expected on the GPS so that gave me a lot of confidence, and the vis hadn’t been that bad despite my growing reservations. I called blind on Abbeville Traffic (123.50) and after joining overhead for runway 02 left hand, landed on the grass next to the hard runway. The airfield was almost deserted and as there was no indication of where or how to park I taxied across to the grass in front of the buildings and shut down. I got out and noticed a hand-written sign ‘Affaires’ on the door of the aero club and assumed that that was where I’d be able to sort out closing my flight plan and everything else to do with customs and the police. However, I’d forgotten that I’d left the UK and was now in France where life is somewhat different 🙂

Inside the building there was nobody around, let alone someone who looked at all official, but luckily I climbed a small flight of stairs up into the ubiquitous small cafe area and found a gent with a cap with a bobble on it reading the notice boards. He assumed that I wanted to close my flight plan and directed me to a grubby cordless phone across the room, one of those old fashioned ones with a retractable antenna that frankly I haven’t seen for about 20 years! There was a phone number biroed on the wall above it so I dialled it. A voice answered almost immediately at the other end and after I had given MYRO’s registration, he replied ‘Your flight plan is closed. Au revoir’ and that was about it.

My friend in the cap with a bobble on it had been waiting and then said to me, ‘Now you pay taxe in front of flag’. I then noticed another building through the window on the other side of the fuel pump where there was a French flag on a white pole, so I thanked him, in French of course 😉 and walked over there. I climbed the steps and entered yet another cafe/bar area where there were various chaps sitting and standing around drinking coffee and smoking. They all looked up as I walked in and seemed friendly enough so I said, ‘Bonjour’ and they all answered in the same way. There was a marvellous French lounge lizard type amongst them with greased down hair and the typically French longish slightly pointed nose and he said ‘Ello, did you ave a nice flight?’ in the most wonderfully French accented English. I said that yes, I had and was just starting on the vis when a small plump chap came scuttling across the room into a side office and I was directed to join him in the ‘bureau’. I noticed that he had the fax on the desk in front of him that I’d sent the previous day to the police/douane number, with a copy to Abbeville. He checked (in French) to make sure I’d closed my flight plan and when I said that I had, he got busy writing what appeared to be a bill. In fact it was the invoice for the landing fee, the princely sum of €3 🙂

Then he pushed a large movements sheet in front of me that showed I was the only incoming aircraft so far that day, presumably on account of the weather. I duly filled it in with my details, arrival time and expected departure time. I’d forgotten that French time moved forward one hour when our clocks did – I was assuming that our times were now the same – so I filled the times in incorrectly, but he was far too polite to point this out and left them as I’d written them. When I’d finished and paid my €3, I asked if there was anything else I had to do with regard to the ‘douane’ and the police. He looked at me, smiled in a knowing kind of way and said, ‘Non monsieur’. So that was it, the sum total of all the formalities to do with entering France from the UK. A piece of cake. I think our problem as Brits is that sometimes we are our own worst enemy and look for problems and issues where there are none. The French are much more pragmatic, shrug their shoulders and just do things. I love that attitude and think that we have a lot to learn from them, but we won’t, ever 😐

It was now time to top up my tanks and get moving again. I’d like to have stayed longer and had a cup of coffee but I had a long way to go before my flying day was over and there just wasn’t the time. In the whole time since I’d arrived at Abbeville there was only one other movement, a French registered Robin, and I suppose that was a clue to what was to come. I started up, taxied round, called blind and took off on the grass. As I climbed and turned on track, it was pretty clear that the vis was getting worse than before. Here’s a pic I’ve again captured from the camcorder, which I’d started up again, that shows what I’m talking about.

This shot was taken just after I’d taken off from Abbeville and set course for Le Gault St Denis and at times during the leg, it was considerably worse than the picture shows. Here’s a pic showing the route I’d planned from Abbeville to Le Gault St Dennis.

I don’t have my papers now because they are all still in MYRO in France, but the flight time was something over 2 hours, the time from Stoke to Abbeville being a little under 2 hours.

I can say quite honestly that I never had a proper horizon the whole of the flight down through France and at times the vis was down to what I would estimate was about 3000 metres. This being France, after calling up when approaching and joining overhead at Abbeville, so long as I avoided Class D airspace or above there was no need for me to make any further radio calls, and that was exactly what I planned to do. And because of the limited vis, I doubt that I heard more than a couple of other aircraft on 123.50 the whole way down on the first day which even so I still found quite surprising.

A few words about flying in limited vsibility. Everyone has to to be responsible for making their own decisions about when and when not to fly. It has a lot to do with ‘comfort zone’ and the more experienced you are the more comfortable you are likely to be flying in conditions of limited vis. It’s never possible to make general statements that will apply to all individuals. Having held an IMC rating in a previous life as a Group A pilot, I have very strong views about how suitable or otherwise microlights are as stable instrument platforms so I would never go beyond what I would perceive as being my personal limits and those of the aircraft. But on the other hand because of my previous training and experience, I am more comfortable than many others about flying in conditions which they might find unacceptable for themselves.

On this occasion I always had a good view of the terrain below my aircraft and there were always adequate visual cues to allow me to fly the aircraft accurately, on track and in a safe attitude. And this, being France, there were almost always more fields below than you could shake a stick at that would be suitable to land in should the need arise.

I say ‘almost always’. My Channel crossing had taken about 21 minutes which at a height of about 5000ft I didn’t regard as being much of a risk because with an engine failure after about a third of the way over, I could more or less have glided to France with the tail wind that I had. However, there were many occasions when I was flying through the murk at low level (around 1400ft) for almost the same amount of time over thick forests or hilly, rocky terrain with little or no road access, where there was absolutely no chance of making a safe forced landing and nothing could therefore be done to mitigate the risk involved. And there were also many occasions when, with the sink and turbulence associated with the broken low cloud I was flying under, I found myself at climb power and speed and still sinking before usually suddenly being whisked up again.

Another thing I experienced which others who had never done so might have found a bit disconcerting was that when there was nothing ahead and around the aircraft but green fields, the land and sky merged ahead into a kind of soup that transitioned from green below through into grey above with absolutely no sign of a horizon. It didn’t worry me too much because I had seen it many times before when flying IMC in Group A and on this occasion I still had good close ground contact that gave me all the visual cues I needed to continue flying the aircraft accurately and safely. And my GPS gave me a line to track just as I used to do before when tracking a VOR, so in many ways it was all very familiar.

My flight leg from Abbeville to Le Gault St Denis went just as planned and my main disappointment was that not only was I unable to take photographs of the beautiful landscape and features that I was flying over but I also couldn’t even see much of it either! In fact, just before arriving at Le Gault, my route took me around the west side of Chartres and even though I had occasional glimpses of the twin towers of the cathedral in the mist, I couldn’t make out any discernible features at all. Such a shame!

Another thing I found and filed away as a mental note for the route ahead, was that as I was flying along, I kept encountering quite a few of the many thousands of wind turbines that now blight the French landscape. Most of them are not very high and so were some way below the aircraft even if I passed right over them. However, there are many in France including the area I was flying over that are absolute monsters and although none came up to the height I was flying at, the ones of those that I did encounter, I had to skirt around to maintain a safe and legal separation from.

As I was approaching Le Gault and searching over MYRO’s nose for the little airstrip that I had ‘visited’ in Google Street View, so knew exactly what I was looking for, another group of wind turbines appeared out of the gloom to my left. In fact they were a help rather than a hazard because then I knew exactly where to look for the tiny ‘piste’, which I immediately spotted from a right hand downwind position and landed at safely.

— Continued in Part 3 —

I didn’t have time to post about what had been going on since my last flight when I thought about getting MYRO to France as soon as there was a suitable weather window. Well, that happened as expected over the Easter week-end, just gone, and I did indeed succeed in flying MYRO over. A lot of planning went into it which was what took much of my time beforehand and the flight itself was an adventure that I’d never have missed for anything. I kept a mental record of the things that happened, the places I visited and the people I met. I wrote it down quickly while it was all still fresh on the microlight forum and have re-written it for here. It’s broken up into four parts, and here’s the first of them.

I left for France as planned on Good Friday, 6th April. My first stop, to close my flight plan and get official clearance into France was at Abbeville and I’d faxed the French ‘douane’ and police on the standard number with a copy to Abbeville airfield the day before departure. I’d then phoned Abbeville to check they’d got it and confirm my intended arrival time in advance because they are a non-radio airfield. The ‘Auto Info’ frequency in France is 123.50 and Abbeville uses that just like hundreds of other airfields in France. For anyone who’d like to know, all the stuff that’s needed is on the Abbeville airfield plate which can be found in English on the following link.

Abbeville Airfield Plate

I then did my flight plan from Stoke to Abbeville and filed it for free on the EuroFPL web site at the link below.

EuroFPL web site

I prefer the flight plan system on the EuroFPL web site to the UK NATS AFPEX one, which I’ve never tried personally, although many of my fellow members at Stoke report that they have had lots of problems with filing their plans on AFPEX for them only to be rejected later due to errors. The EuroFPL system however, allows you to create and store your flight plan for later submission, at which time it verifies it and shows it coloured red if it contains errors or green if it doesn’t. This saves time and stress because you can be assured that when you do click the ‘File Flight Plan’ button, it will go through. I was going to buy SkyDemon to do this for me along with all the other stuff it does but as I thought that once in France I’d probably have very little use for it, I decided not to. But I think it’s brilliant software and if I had a microlight that was capable of more extensive touring – which MYRO isn’t really 🙂 – I’d have had no hesitation in buying it as I’d originally planned. I found that even the SkyDemon 30 day trial version was a great help to me in my planning and I have to confess that I used its flight plan ‘screen printout’ which you can’t file in the 30 day version though, as the basis for the plan I put in on EuroFPL.

Then as usual, whenever you make time-sensitive plans, everything began to ever-so-slightly unravel. I was a bit late getting to Stoke, mainly because my car windscreen was frozen up, and when I arrived, because the overnight temperature had been something like -8 deg C, MYRO’s wings were covered with thick frost. Its wing covers were damaged in the 80mph winds we had in January and I haven’t finished repairing them yet, so even if I had been ready, I couldn’t have got away until all the frost had been removed. When everything had been sorted I was something like 45 minutes behind schedule. I knew I’d never be able to make that up on a 2 hour leg into Abbeville so I just had to swallow it.

The take off went fine and after saying cheerio to my pal Ken who’d dropped me off at Stoke over the radio, I switched to Farnborough East and called in. Nothing. OK, then I tried Manston. Again nothing. Then Lydd, Headcorn and back to Farnborough. Still nothing, so I assumed my radio had let me down for the first time ever. I decided there was no way I was going to go back and carried on flying through about 2500ft by that time for my planned 5000ft and then, when I tried Farnborough again they came through 5s. So that was a relief!

We went through the usual chat and my ‘negative transponder’ response didn’t seem to worry them too much. We kept in touch with occasional position reports but I suspect they could see me. I’d given them an estimate for Dover and some time later just I was overhead and about to coast out they called asking for my position.

Unfortunately my plans to take loads of pics and videos during the flight were mostly scuppered by the weather. It was OK over the UK but taking shots through France was impossible because of turbulence and bumps the whole way down, and there was no way that I could relax for even a moment to get my camera out and aim it. And then there was the vis, but I’ll come on to that later. I did have the camcorder running after take off at Stoke though, and here’s a screenie I’ve captured off the video from when I was approaching Dover at about 5200ft.

What you can’t see from it is that it was CAVOK with absolutely no cloud in the UK which made me think I was going to get the flight of a lifetime. But what you can see is the broken low cloud starting at Dover with an ominously murky looking layer in the distance starting at the French coast, and this did help to make it the flight of a lifetime, but for a completely different reason however 🙂

I’d given Farnborough an estimate for the FIR boundary and as I crossed it I called to tell them I was changing to Lille. What I’d done as well the night before the flight was put all the frequencies that I was going to need into my trusty Vertex VXA-220 radio, more or less in the order I was going to need them and all also with alpha name tags. This made changing to the right frequencies when I needed to a complete doddle. Lille came in loud and clear and after getting my position and altitude they were keen to get me down to 1500ft or less by the French coast to ensure I stayed under their TMA. I knew that of course and after I did that and then advised them that I was going to avoid CAS until I arrived at Abbeville they were very happy and more or less left me alone apart from the occasional request for a position report. They also advised me that they had no known traffic or any other issues on my route to Abbeville so that was helpful. However, what I did have was a broken cloud base of 1500ft and quite severe turbulence. This wasn’t as bad as I’d experienced in the past though, so I wasn’t too worried. What I didn’t like much though was a visibility of about 3 miles or occasionally less and little did I know that this was going to be the best I’d get until I got to about 10 miles from my ultimate destination in the Dordogne!

Luckily I was quite well prepared. Visual navigation would have been a total non-starter, as I believe it is for any long solo flight over unknown terrain no matter what charts you may be carrying. So what I’d done was scan and load the charts I needed into MemoryMap and then print out a screen capture of each flight leg onto A4 paper. Then I’d sticky taped all the prints together in order, wrapped them around a sheet of thin A4 cardboard to stiffen them and popped them into a clear plastic folder secured with a small crocodile clip. So at any time I had two flight legs visible, one on the front and one on the back. Then after I’d flown them, I switched over to the next two legs and as I only had four (three on day one and one on day two), I only had to do it once, but in theory the method would work no matter how many legs a flight consisted of. So as the flight progressed, I could compare my position on my ‘cheap car satnav’ with my position on my ‘chart’ to work out my time estimates, and the result was that I was never more than a minute out on any leg, which I thought was pretty good. It also allowed me to accurately estimate my fuel burn and although it was a bit higher than I’d originally planned for, the safety margins that I’d built in always meant that I never had any worries on that score either. And it also meant that I didn’t have to have reams of actual French maps in the cabin with me, which was already extremely cramped, what with me, two jerries, as many of MYRO’s covers as I could fit in, my flight bag, my personal bag and, of course, my own fuel funnel (I’d never, ever use anyone else’s).

With my second tank I could load about 50 litres into MYRO. This, at 15 lit/hr would give me an endurance of about 3 hours and I’d planned for none of my legs to be quite as long as that. I’d also loaded two 20 litre jerry cans of pre-mixed 2-stroke so I’d planned my fuel stops to use the fuel in the tanks and then for that to be topped up from the jerries with more added when needed from local purchases. I’ve left my papers in MYRO back in the France now but as a rough idea, I didn’t need to buy fuel at Abbeville where there’s only very expensive AVGAS because I could fill my tanks back up from my jerries and fly on to my next stop at Le Gault St Denis near Chateaudun where I’d arranged to pick up more mogas. I’d also taken my own oil – just enough for the 40 additional litres of fuel that I thought I’d need to buy en-route.

—- Continued in Part 2 —-

After not having flown for three weeks, I managed an hour yesterday. I flew south around Maidstone, down to Linton and back. I was surprised to see an aircraft there outside the main hangar – some regular readers might recall that my main feeling about Linton was that it’s a lovely strip but while I was there, hardly anyone except me ever flew! But unsurprisingly, although there was an aircraft parked, I couldn’t see any flying going on 😐

Yesterday was the perfect day that I would have chosen for my flight down to Plazac, bright, good vis and a good northerly tail wind, and it got me thinking. My plans at present are to move my belongings and furniture down shortly after 19th April and then fly MYRO down ASAP after my return. Then to return by Ryanair from Bergerac and finallly drive down in my car with the dog. However, the main unknown is the weather and getting a suitable week-end when everything is ‘just right’ for the flight down could be a bit tricky. So I got to thinking, why not fly MYRO down as soon as a good weather window presents itself? It may mean that it will be parked up for a couple of weeks while I’m still in England but that won’t be a problem, especially if Bob can get some weighted tie-down tyres made for me and I also take MYRO’s covers down with me.

I checked the weather forecasts yesterday and although the warm, balmy unseasonable weather that we’ve currently been enjoying will be replaced by an ‘Arctic blast’ this week, it appears that next week-end could be suitable as northerly winds with not too many strong gusts are expected once the more extreme stuff has passed through. And also, as it’s Easter week-end, there will be four days in France due to the holiday when the low level restricted military corridors won’t apply compared to the usual two for a normal week-end.

So it seems a bit of a no-brainer to me and my thoughts now are to prepare MYRO for the flight by this coming Thursday (new plugs, tanks topped up and jerry cans filled ready to go) and leave either on Friday or Saturday at around 7.30 am. I’ve got the route and fuel stops all planned out so all it would need is a couple of calls to France to pre-arrange for assistance in buying fuel en route and for my cross Channel flight plan to be filed the day before. The more I think about it, the more I come around to the idea that it’s the sensible thing to do 😉

Two words that came to mind this afternoon. The last few weeks have been rather dispiriting and a bit stressful as well. I knew that at some time my house sale and the purchase of my new home in France would be going through but after getting the process started, I seem to have been in a bit of a limbo for ages with no signs of visible progress.

I’ve made a good start on getting rid of stuff I no longer need or want to take with me but there’s still much to do. I know that retiring means that I’ll be stopping working, probably for ever, and will have to run down and cease my business, but not having a time-scale to work to makes planning for these things very difficult and, as I mentioned previously, all a bit stressful.

Well, hopefully that is now all coming to an end. I met with my buyer this afternoon and we agreed on a target completion date for my house sale of Thursday 19th April. We thought about making it a bit sooner but the date we finally chose seems to me to be about right. It means that I’ll probably have to book my removal truck, which I’ll be driving down through France myself, for the week commencing Wednesday 18th so it means that everything will have to be sewn up by then and all the stuff I want to take with me packed and ready to go.

It’s a bit scary I have to confess. It’s one thing to make plans that will change your life forever, but quite another when they start to happen in reality. But hey ho, there’s no stopping now… 😉

I was thinking about having perhaps an hour’s flying yesterday but the weather forecast was a bit iffy. Actually, the Met Office web site indicated that the weather in the south-east would be not too bad for the whole day but the TAF for Southend said that things would get distinctly nasty going into the afternoon with thunderstorms and hailstones expected later on!

So I decided to give it a miss, and it turned out to be the right decision. Firstly, although we didn’t get the full works predicted by the Southend TAF, we did get rain preceded by low cloud and a freshening of the wind, so flying wouldn’t have been all that enjoyable in those conditions. But instead of flying, I decided that I had to get cracking clearing my spare room, because following conversations at the end of last week with the estate agent in Montignac and my buyer over here, my house move will soon become imminent and unless I get rid of all my rubbish and other unwanted stuff, I’ll be left with it all to do.

It was hard work but a day (well, OK then, afternoon 😐 ) well spent. I got quite a few recycling and rubbish bags filled up and realised just how much I still have to do. So that was a good thing – now I know I really must start getting my finger out 😉

I wanted to fly today because I needed a break after a particularly hard week and also because I wanted tomorrow free for sorting things to do with the house sale and move. But the day had a gloomy start and although brighter spells were forecast for the afternoon, there was a bit of mist around. Anyway, I decided to do a plan to take me towards the north-west and any incoming weather and thought I might see if I could get up as far as North London (Lippits Hill Reservoir) and back again.

As it happened, by the time I got to Stoke at around 1.30pm it looked as though the haze wasn’t too bad and with the wind from the north-west at about 8-10mph, I thought I’d give it a go. I was away at 2.35pm and all looked pretty good. However, by the time I got past the M25 in north-east London, it was pretty obvious that if I carried on, I’d be flying over a pretty densely built up area. It seemed silly to do that when I had no need to so I decided to turn back, head into South Essex for a bit and cross back over the Thames. I think it was a good decision. I got back to Stoke after just a bit under an hour so I thought I’d carry on over the Medway estuary and do a circuit of Sheerness.

I couldn’t believe the number of imported cars that were parked up there ready for sale – much more than in recent months so maybe a sign that the car companies think that the economic situation is improving. Unfortunately I couldn’t get to my camera so continued round to approach Stoke from the south over the estuary. Garry was doing solo circuits – well done mate, not too long now 😉 – so I joined downwind and slotted in behind him. Compared to when I’d taken off, the wind was now much more tricky on landing – gusting 15mph at 90 degrees to the runway – and I was surprised how skittish the landing was. But all was well and after taxying up to the top of the taxiway and switching off, I pulled MYRO through to the area next to the Club Hut where I got some help to pull it through the gap around to the tie-down area.

And who should then drop in with a student on a dual cross-country but my lovely friend Rosie in the C42 up from Clipgate. I was only speaking to her the other day about my French plans so it was a lovely surprise to see her at Stoke today. Hugs all round and she took a quick look at MYRO because it was the first time she’d seen it since the repair and indeed, since she did MYRO’s check flight nearly two years ago. My how time flies and now so must I to get ready for tomorrow 🙂

Not quite, but…. We had a lull in the weather yesterday – just a few light winds and conditions quite good for flying actually. But today the winds are back, not quite as bad as before but bad enough. 20 gusting 35mph from the north-west with a temperature of 8 degrees C and heavy rain expected this afternoon. I’ve just checked the weather for Plazac – wind 5 gusting 7mph from the west with a temperature of 11 degrees and broken cloud with sunny spells this afternoon. Like I say, not quite chalk and cheese, but I know which I prefer 😉

No flying last week-end because of windy weather but because the forecast was for the winds to increase dramatically, I dropped into Stoke anyway on Saturday to check that MYRO’s tie-downs were nice and tight. And as usual, while I was there I made sure as well that both of the X’airs that are tied down in the same area were also secure.

Well, it turns out that it was a good move. The wind was gusting 50-60mph again from the north-west last night and as I type this at 9.30am after returning from a visit to the Dentist, it’s not blowing very much less strongly now and conditions are still pretty wild. But now with a bright blue sky with clouds racing across it. These constant storm-force winds are becoming very monotonous this winter and I just hope that no harm comes to MYRO before I get my chance to fly south away from all this awful unpredictable Atlantic weather down to where the conditions and climate are so much more microlight friendly 😉

I’ve just returned to edit this post at 8.00pm. These winds are truly hellish. We’ve had them all day long which means that we’ve now had strong winds with gusts in excess of 50-60mph for over 24 hours. In fact I would think that some have been higher than that even, as they’ve hit the conservatory where I’ve been working all day like an express train passing through a station. Now it’s dark, the security light outside keeps switching itself on because of the movement of the trees and bushes in its vicinity and I really am becoming fearful for MYRO. This is not the kind of weather for any aircraft to be tied down outside, especially one as light as MYRO, but there’s nothing I can do except sit it out with my fingers crossed and hope that no damage is done. Luckily after the last experience a few weeks ago, I locked MYRO’s rudder to the horizontal stabiliser struts with cable ties otherwise I’m pretty sure it would by now have been battered enough against the elevator trim to have done more damage to the rudder fabric and possibly even to the rudder cables. I can’t remember a winter with winds like this for many a year – we had a few last year, but I flew almost every week-end from Linton, right through until the spring. This year is quite different and I have to say that I’ll be glad to escape all of these problems and be somewhere where the weather is less extreme. I was going to say ‘chaotic’ because that’s how it feels right now with the winds outside – like it’s chaos out there 😐

The other evening I was talking about my planned route down to Plazac with Bob and he suggested that I might want to think about adding Dave and Amanda Lord’s Wanafly France as a possible waypoint. When I checked I actually found that Wanafly is almost slap bang on my route between Blois and Limoges so it could be a distinct possibility.

Given that it’s about 3/4 of the way down and that I’ll be flying in MYRO which is not the fastest aircraft for international touring by any means (that’s an understatement!), it could well be that that’s as far as I’d be able to make in a day, either because of failing daylight at this time of year, or just through sheer tiredness. And at Wanafly I’d be able to get a nice bed for the night, a terrific meal I’m led to believe and fuel, so it sounds like a good idea to have the option available.

So I’ve amended my route pic in my previous post to include Wanafly and I’ve also added a little jink to the south of it to make sure I stay clear of Limoges controlled airspace. I also noticed that on my way to Dover, I will pass directly over Clipgate Farm near Canterbury which is the farm strip where I did my microlight training with Rosie right back at the beginning. It seems really appropriate in a way that I will be flying over where I first flew MYRO all that time ago for what could be it’s final flight in UK airspace, back to France where it originally came from.

So it’s all getting more exciting by the day and I just know that it’ll be an amazing flight 😀

I mentioned in a post a few days ago that my idea when the time comes is to fly MYRO down to my new home in the Dordogne. I still don’t know when that will be although I expect the move to happen sometime around the middle of April. I checked my planned route out again in SkyDemon (a brilliant piece of software – I’ll definitely buy it before I go) over the week-end and came to the conclusion that I’ll really have to have either a tail wind or hardly anything on the nose if the wind is from the south when I eventually make the flight. And as I’ll be flying at a low altitude, I’d also prefer to do the flight on a week-end when the French military low flight danger areas aren’t active. My planned route is shown on the following pic.

After crossing the Channel, I’ll drop into Abbeville to clear French customs and close my flight plan from Stoke. After that I’ll be free to fly at my own pace. I’d really like to do the whole flight in a day if I can which will only be possible if I have a tail wind I think, and that’ll also allow me to make only two stops along the way, at Abbeville and Blois, where the fantastic French microlight show is held every year. Although I could purchase mogas along the way in France, my idea is to fill MYRO’s tanks and also take two full jerry cans of fuel on the seat beside me. That way if I top up my tanks at Abbeville from my jerry cans, I should be able to make it to Blois where I should be able to buy as much fuel as I need to complete the journey.

But I won’t know the full details until much closer to the actual time, because of the way that the weather can affect my plans. And before I fly MYRO down, I’ll have to complete my sale and purchase and hire a 7.5 tonne van to take all the stuff down that I intend to keep. So there’s still a bit to sort out and as I’ve just had a call from the French estate agent asking for a letter from my Solicitor confirming that my sale is going through, I need to arrange that straight away. There’s always something… 😉

It was a lovely flying day today with wind from the north west at about 7 gusting 10 mph. So today I planned a flight over towards Brentwood in Essex then around clockwise to Billericay and South Woodham Ferrers before returning to Stoke via Canvey Island. I’ve shown the planned route in the pic below.

And today I had the pleasure of the company of my friend Mary who was to have her first flight in a microlight, so it was a good day for it with only a modest wind and little by the way of gusts and bumps. We took off on runway 06 but could have gone off in either direction as the wind was more or less at 90 degrees to the runway. The flight went off exactly as planned and in fact we saw very little in the way of other traffic despite the fine conditions. When we joined overhead at Stoke I decided to take runway 24 for landing as it seemed to me that there was a bit more of nose wind vector on that heading, but it was a close thing. But anyway, we landed safely after a very enjoyable flight of 1 hour 15 minutes and after a a bit of chat and banter with a few friends in the club hut, headed for home. Another really fun flight 😉