Aviation Tour - Maps on www.bankleft.com

The Bank Left web page indicates the route that we flew through the alps - from Constance in Germany south west, south of the Jura to Grenchen for the night.then over lake Neuchatel, south to Lake Geneva, around the north shore of the lake past Lausanne, up the mighty Rhone valley, ascending to 12,000 feet past Mt Blanc and the Matterhorn, over the central passes then south to the Italian part of Switzerland, on the south face of the range to Lugano.

After some coffee and Geleto (we had been eating sandwiches on board for lunch) we took a departure route from Lugano south over the lake to look at the area, then ascending again to 12,000 feet for a path direct over the range to central Switzerland.


The Jab has a ceiling of 15,000 feet and even with our prop set course was still climbing at a few hundred feet a minute through 12,000 feet.



Discussions with the alp locals in Annecy have since taught us that we should have climbed slower to acclimatise better. With our zoom to 12,000 I ended up with a dull headache after half an hour. In future, I'd make the small investment in some oxygen bottles for operation at that height.

Glacier!



Three weeks later after a loop through central Germany, we are back in the alp foothills at Annecy and I am extremely glad that we made the effort to make this 5 hour flight through the alps while the weather allowed. Although we have been in Annecy for several days now, the weather hasn't been good for heading into the alps and it is deteriorating for the remainder of the week. We have been planning for Italy, cycling, making short local flights over lake Annecy and eating great cheese instead.

The airstrip at Constance is wonderful - a grass runway right in the centre of town. Highly recommended as a destination. Our flight around the lake would take us from Germany to Switzerland to Austria then back to Germany.

This is the Rhine flowing into the lake from the south;

While we were filing a flight plan in the pilot lounge on Bornholm a few months ago, we met Family Wagner. Morten, Brigitte and their three children spent a year flying all around Africa and were impressed to hear about our trip. We each had scheduled departures, us north to Sweden and them east on holiday to Lithuania so we exchanged cards and agreed to catch up if possible.

H and I wanted to hear about the African trip and spend some time with like minded people so when Morten invited us to stay with their family at their B&B, we planned a return north to Denmark for a week.

These guys are dynamic – the pace of their family life was awesome. Morten oversees their farming interests in Lithuania and works for the local regional bank, business consulting to their clients. Brigitta and Mort have just spent 3 years personally hand building their house and it is marvellous – arranged with the garages and B&B around a courtyard in classic Danish style, it has sweeply expansive open planned living spaces, a lovely 360 degree fireplace and state of the art "smart home" technology. Every light, power point, applicance, and heating service is cabled back to the space above their garage (more than 7km of cable) where each is individually IP addressed. Long story short, Morton can dim the garage lighting from his ipad while he, us and 60 of the family's closests friends are having a sit down BBQ there on Friday night. Nice. More practically, when you leave the house, you swipe your fingerprint on the reader and if you are the last person leaving (sensors detect), all lights are turned off and heating is switched to standby. Easy. With a small amount of thought about the arrangement of modern lighting, the idea of selecting a pre-set 'mode' for the space's overall combination of lighting works vastly more effectively than the obviously redundant traditional alternative of manually switching one particular light.

Mid morning coffee with Morton talking to me and the Wagner's neighbours across the table. The neighbours are rebuilding their house and showed us how to tile a bathroom.

Brigitta's father helped set up the local museum. Here she is pointing out the grinder that she remembers from her childhood;

Morten took us to see the local chapter of a very successful youth program that the area runs. Chaired by Mort, the system has multiple sites where all the youth come every night for a combination of classes about interesting and practical things (art, scooter maintenance, deisgn, cooking) as well as just hanging out together, doing karayoke, playing pool and network PC games. Most notable was the way that the adults treated the young people as adults and were similarly accorded human respect. Instead of running around the street or staying at home, these regional Danish locals have a selection of warm supervised places where they can meet, learn, play and behave like socialised humans. Helen and I think that Denmark is a good place to grow up. You really get a feeling walking around and talking to people that there is a real human respect for other people. It is evident in the air, on the road, in shops, when you make mistakes and when you ask for help.



After a great week in Kolding we had to head south to Switzerland, 5 hrs of flying, to catch Helen's family there before they head over to Australia for European winter. Long flight? This is first class comfort Bank Left style. The funniest thing is having to fall out of the plane on to the apron in front of the refuellers upon arrival;


We discovered an awesome castle on the flight south. Do you think they'll let us keep it?


What a great castle!


We stopped at Frankfurt to meet Vincent who I'd been emailing about flying in Switzerland. He is a really interesting guy who works on the technical side of air traffic control systems and recently made an American flying trip, coast to coast and back again trip. We'll definitely catch up again.


Here we are at our destination, Constance airfield. It is the closest airfield to Helen's family's place in Switzerland, and turns out to be a lovely grass strip right in town on Bodensee (lake Constance);

Before she moves south later in the year, we visited Helen's friend Kirsten in Hannover, west of Berlin. We were really pleased to see Kirsten in London last year so it was nice to catch up. Her boyfriend Gerd came up for the weekend too. They are a lovely couple who work in different areas of the same company in the area of GIS – Global Information System, involved with the many applications for computer geographic mapping. Really good stuff.

When Saturday dawned warm and clear, we plucked out the road altas and found a nice local airfield in the hills to the south east for the four of us to fly out to.

To catch up with my sister Clare and her Guntraum on their home turf, we dropped south from Denmark via the beautiful historic Hansa trade town of Lubeck (best pic of the trip yet? The city, not me eating marzipan);

It was nice to be back in Berlin, particularly for Helen who lived here there for 5 years. It is a very easy city with quite a lot happening. There is a real sense of the spare economic capacity though, with low prices, many people working part tim or on a volunteer basis. We has no agenda other than spending time with the family, though I finally managed to get several really decent cycle rides in and we picked up some particularly good leather shoes and some new noise reduction headsets for flying.

C & G were in excellent form with an impressively well sorted life in their new apartment. We checked out the local Bauhaus and IKEA as part of the ongoing apartment sorting, cooked up a few things and watched a couple of bad girl-films on their mega "beamer" (projector) which was awesome. There are two new small kittens at their place, causing amusement and frustration in roughly equal amounts. Helen busted them stealing cat food direct from the box and their favorite passtime seemed to be learning how to open doors and climbing up to investigate food.

Helen and I went for a flight over Berlin with Anatol and EEEE who are business associates of H'd friend who runs a wine store. We wanted to view the 1936 Olympic stadium and the Albert Spier designed central city airport, Templehof.

We took one full day to carefully look at everything on display at the Bauhaus archive, housed in a building designed by Walter Gropius. If anything, it made me even more aware of how fragile and fleeting any framework for productive progress is.