Sunday, November 14, 2010
Annecy
Annecy! Yeah yeah yeah!
After a few years of fairly relentless investigation of new places, it was a strange and comforting feeling to be cycling along the same smooth lake shore path that we rode in September last year. Filled with clear bright blue 'rock flour' mineral pure mountain water from the top of Europe, lake Annecy displays quality. We were both thrilled to be back in Haute Savoie and wasted no time in jumping on the bikes to learn the area better (and pick up some of the local cheese Tomme de Savoie, the name sake of Tom, Helen's personal bespoke compartment under her seat in our plane. I, on the other hand, copped the avionics' accelerometers).
We have some friends who moved here a few months ago. Kevin, who Helen met while travelling in NZ 15 years ago and his wife Aurelia. Their son Elliot is 4 and their daughter Emmeline is 2. They invited us to stay with them at their ginormous place up on the hill over town. Awesome. We cooked up a few classic mega cheese fest meals in the local style and had many a laugh.
Elliot is starting to learn about aeroplanes and was keen to make his first flight. After a few months of training on the flight simulator at home he appreciated my panel layout, asking for details of what each 'clock' was for :)
We headed into Geneva and helped make a few expensive mechanical watches at Breguet. Top job Helen. Dr Horologie has just spent all morning cleaning up his engraving on that watch face, go ahead and write on it. The owner likely won't notice. The screen in the top left of the pic shows a close up of the action.
Breguet is one of the more mechanically innovative of the original old watch companies. When I complained that my watch was losing 4 minutes a day they kindly demagnetised it for me. It has run on time since. The told us that their pilot's watches have heavy iron cases to deal with the strong fluctuating magnetic fields in the cockpit.
Kev and I flew in to Annemasse near Geneva to check out their training fleet. I've never seen so many Robins in one place before! I wonder how they fare, being left out in the weather with timber wings.
I made us a little unpopular by not making myself aware of their excruciatingly intricate noise abatement procedures. The circuit is on the FAR SIDE of the hill you can see in the photo below, to avoid any complaints from the mansions on the hillside overlooking the airfield. After apologising profusely and pointing out that our military forced landing style glide approach from directly overhead made no noise at all, we were all friends again and I was left to absorb the 18 stage VFR departure route (got it, right turn 30 degrees onto 185 once past the warehouse but before I get to the scrap metal yard).
There were two rows of Robins like this;
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