Aviation Tour - Maps on www.bankleft.com

St Emillion is a unesco listed ancient village cut into the white stone from which buildings are construced here. The naturally formed SE orientated gully is cut into an escarpement and limits the extent of the village. Two of the top classified estates in the St Emilion appelation, Pavie and Ausone have been planted since roman times. We stayed at the Gite of a wine making family Lasfagreas just north of St Emilion at Chateuax La Roseraie. St George St Emilion appelation was just to the north of where we stayed, across a small stream. The rolling terrain in these areas is dotted with old oaks. Compared to the Medoc, Graves, Pomerol or Entre Deux Mer (between the rivers), it is a lovely place. Without the support of our books in selecting wineries we resorted to cycling around the area and picking out good plots. The large Chateaux have been built on all of the best growing terrain so this helped us decide whos doors to knock on. Being well out of tourist season, we had to impose slightly on several occasions which turned out to be well worth the effort.

The final day in St Emilion showed just how good the weather is in the area. Despite being clobbered by several rain and hail fronts, we were able to cycle around between the showers in bright warm sun shining through the crist air. We are currently in Chartres, half way back to the UK. The whole of the north of France is covered in snow which is fairly unnerving. The runway here is only 800m but was mainly clear for our arrival this afternoon.

As we move further north, there is more and more snow. At the latitude to the Loire, there was just a dusting, setting this fabulous Chateua off nicely. Why not construct right ON the river (gallic shrug);



The weather is not looking particularly good this week so we will have to proceed north tomorrow with caution. It feels as though we have really done the most that we could this year – there was snow on the ground when we arrived back in the UK to construct the plane on the 8^th January, as there presumably is now for our return. I had to pour warm water over the carburettor to be able to start the plane today and crunch around in ankle deep snow to tie down and unpack. We haven;t been able to sleep in the tent for the past month. I won't be best pleased if we manage to get all the way back to the UK tomorrow and we find that the trains aren't running down to London from Norfolk where the plane will hibernate. Politicians are making press releases that "The UK is well prepared" but they did that at the start of the year too, shortly before running out of grit salt for the roads and being forced to buy tons from Germany at huge expense. One couldn't even find table salt in the supermarkets for a month. Happy days for panel beaters, bit not a big improvement for my boiled egg and soldiers in the morning.


Check out this military airport in northern France - they were closed due to the snow so we were allowed to fly over them. You'd think they'd put the planes inside in these conditions, wouldn't you?




I'm very much looking forward to seeing our build supervisor Gary and our friends in London for a sadly short few days on the way through but I'm trying not to think about The Underground and Heathrow. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean. I'll think I'll act like a Japanese commuter, pull my beanie down over my eyes, wedge tunes into my ears and take deep controlled breaths. Bring On the Sunny Side!

We have travelled to all of the other wine regions in France preferentially over the past few years on the baisis that Bordeaux is overrated. It isn't.

The city is has incredibly complete and consistent three hunderd year old stone building stock. It was great fun to cycle in 10 km from Saucats airfield north past grand Chateaux and vinyards into the town of 250,000 people. The small winding streets through the town outskirts boast row after row of facades composed of individually distinct highly decorated houses. The town has the style and class of Paris withouth the attitude or squalor. It has the climate and entertainment value of Nice, without the insecure objection to foreigners or gauche bling. The people were fun, open and friendly. In all, a very comfortable place. The obvious challenge before us, one by no means certainly possible in this region, was to see if we could find some good wine produced at a reasonable price.




We stayed near St George St Emillion, the (hilly, south facing) heart of the purple area to the East of Libourne on the Right Bank;



Helen knows enough to know that you don't walk in to the good producers in St George St Emilion and expect a tasting. Unencumbered by this knowledge, I overcame my lack of French with a ton of smiling and arm waving and convinced the largest estate in the appelation (operating a quarter of the planted area) to show us their wares. Fantastic they were, too. Such a shame that the plane's cellar is so small.




2005 was such a strong vintage in Bordeaux that many of the small estates have hoarded a proportion of their production to smooth over bad years. This is 12,000 bottles at Chateau Tour St Pierre, a Grand Crue vinyard owned by the Mayor of St Emilion until his death in 2007, now operated by his niece photographed here. Their '08 and '05 are lovely, their '03 was a car crash and there is a bottle of their '01 open on the table in front of me here in Greenwich London that is undrinkably badly corked. Thems the breaks with old Bordeaux I guess.

Lezgnon Corbier turns out to be where France Air bring their pilots in Cherokeers to practise cross wind landings. The local hills funnel the wind down over the plain and they see 50kt most of the time. 30 yeras ago when they put the motorway through the area, they were forced to alter the runway orientation to 30 degreese out of the prevailing winds. Funnily enough, there aren't any flying schools here. I'm sweating down the approach with no flap, full rudder in and still needing to crab into wind, watching 100kt airspeed when Helen nonchalantly tells me "don't worry, GPS says we are only making 40 kt over the ground". We tied down to as many heavy things that we could drag out onto the apron as possible and jumped into a taxi towards a Gite (guest house) at a local wine grower's.

Love those autumnal colours!

Albi, on the river Garonne up stream a few hundred miles from Bordeaux, is a recently unesco listed medieval city. By flying up river, we were able to see the shiny new amazing bridge across the valley.

For a while we thought that the Gite owners were talking about a Roman viaduct when they kept telling us about the 'Viaduc de Millau'. Now we know better. Voila!

The Garonne has some neat meanders in this area. I suppose that the castle on the thin part of ground here defended the land on the island river. Lush.