Aviation Tour - Maps on www.bankleft.com

After two years, ten thousand nautical miles, two hundred landings and seven Alp crossings, our home built aeroplane adventure is at an end. The final week of the trip was made challenging with misty and hazy conditions across northern Europe. Currently excited and relieved to be on the ground in London, we are looking forward to being in Australia next week.
Map; www.bankleft.com
In Rome, packed and ready to roll out for the flight north.

Flying west from Lithuania through Poland, we visited the Masurian lakes district on the advice of a German aero journalist we'd met in Bonn. The area is fast developing into an aviation hot spot and swooped and cycled around several of the airfields there. Hitler's eastern front bunker, where he spent the majority of his time in the war is clearly visible from the air, though overgrown with vegetation.


The amazing huge flying club/hotel at Kikkity was a revelation. The pilots there invited us to accompany them on a four day tour of the Czech Republic, along with 18 other planes.


There are many timber carvings like these ones in the forests in the area.


Czech is an excellent place to aviate - the rolling terrain is endlessly interesting, there are many amazing historic towns to see and they have a strong history of flying and aircraft design and manufacture.
For anyone thinking of going to Prague who hasn't been there before, I'd suggest you go to Cesky Kromlov instead. It is jaw droppingly awesome.

Here we are relaxing under the wing at the first of 7 stops on the rally schedule.


This is Siggy who invited us to join the Czech rally.



We managed to snap some decent mid air shots of our friend Simon on the final leg of the day. We are still trying to meet up with him again after several failed attempts due to bad weather or us having to fly elsewhere. He is a totally classic character!

This is all I have to say about Prague really....

The whole Vilnius area is wooded and hilly and we spent a week checking out the nice areas around the city as well as looking at the history of the place and its people in the museums. This photo below shows a carved bellows from a blacksmith's shop.


The airport at Kaunas where we met Justie is named after these two aviators, shown on the 10 Lat note. They made a vast pioneering flight only to perish in an accident shortly before making it back safely.


This amazing town wall gate contains a chapel, complete with organ and Catholics taking mass!


I bought a pair of running shoes and whipped myself to crank out a few laps of the local forest which was very soft, green and peaceful. The climate here is wonderful in mid summer. We bought wild mushrooms and tiny wild strawberries (packed with flavour) from the roadside and cooked them up at Justinas' house. Isn't this sculpture great?

 

 This is the largest timber building I have ever seen. It is some kind of strange restaurant now, fully furnished with oak and leather tables, chairs and couches. It felt like an old school barn/hotel establishment.

There are some very good beers brewed in the area and some great non alcoholic brewed malt drinks.

We managed to time our arrival in Stockholm to catch the annual flying meet up at the airfield just east of the city, Skaa Edeby.

Lenny and Terry bombed in briefly on their way back from the Eeslov fly in. Once we heard about all the large rocks in the lake, we gave up insisting that they should have landed on the water ;)


Johan and Vanya landed late in the day (maybe 10pm, still with good light). We were surprised to see them again having met them at the Siljansnaes airpark further north last year. We had a chance to eat brunch in the sun and catch up which was very pleasant.



Martin and Gabriella arrived the next day on route to the arctic circle (microlight pilots make all the best adventures)! He is an Engineer like me in Muenster.



The lake water is so cold that as you walk down to the island shore, the air temperature drops about 5 degrees. It is a little spooky. Here we are climbing out bound for Stockholm.

Back to Sweden, for their home build annual event held this year in the Skaane town of Eeslov.
Over three days of stunning weather we watched displays and met many new people from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany and the UK.

This is Dieter and Marie, who we camped next to. He used to be an airline captain but now they live on north of Jutland in Denmark where they sail and fly and photograph. Dieter lived with bears in Alaska for 8 years. His site rocks www.betz.dk



Carsten built his Savanna on Anholt (Denmark) where he runs the power and water for the island.


H wants a flying boat. The guys who brought this water micro to the fly in, Lenny and Terry distribute this design in Sweden. We saw them again a few days later when they landed on the island of Vissingso in the middle of lake Vattern a few minutes after us, on their way back to Stockholm from the fly in.


Daniel, the aerobatic pilot from Skaa Edeby near Stockholm, who we met last year while he was crating up his Yak to display in China, is now flying a Sukhoi. These are the best aerobatics aeroplane in the world. A small number were made in the 80s with no expense spared by the Soviet Union to ensure their supremacy in competition. They have a ridiculously stiff wing and titanium undercarriage. Since they reputedly take about 2 years of training for a world class aerobatics pilot to adapt to, I though Daniel was flying pretty cleanly after only a few month with the new plane.


DC10 :)

Aero is a southern Danish island with the statistically warmest weather of anywhere in the country. Presumably this is the reason for it being just across the water from the Royal's summer palace at Sondeborg. The villages haven't changed in several hundred years, they are wonderful thick stone walled dwellings on winding cobbled streets, huddled together against the weather from over the water.

Aeroskoebing (along with Marstal, one of the two main towns on Aero);



Marstal (below) is the center of wooden ship yards in Denmark and there are several restoration projects underway there. It had been an important trading port for many centuries.


We flew north to Tarsinge where we helped start a Rans micro that had been hangered all winter before cycling over the bridge to the much larger island of Fyn.




Svendeborg on Fyn, over the bridge;

To catch up with Eva and Rune we headed west from Sweden back to the Danish Island of Samso. Rune was in a flurry, organising his imminent departure to Sydney to fly float planes for a week so we were pleased to catch him before he left.

We hear about a pan cake fly in on Fun, east of Odense so took to the air for the 20 minute flight south.
As well as seeing Lars and Catrin again (and convincing Lars to come for a round of golf on the course on Samso), we met several of the micro pilots from that area. Excellent pancakes, enthusiastic people. Great combination :)


 Erik and his wife host the local micro club and have installed a former boarder control guard box to act as a pancake eating and pow wow station. Excellent!





A troupe of German parachutists arrived overhead Samso one day, as part of their 3 day 15 airfield jump safari. We were impressed. What an operation.



This vast castle on the south edge of Samso turns out to have been built for the mistress of a Danish king. It now seems to be the part of a privately owned farming estate.


Valentina and Lorenzo have recently moved up to Samso from Venice. They invited us for dinner at their new house which they have refurbished into a store for the Italian wine and food that they sell. This summer they are starting Gelato production. Lorenzo has attended the Gelato university that we've been considering so it was interesting to hear about the course, which he recommends. He was the Italian dealer of a particular modern microlight design and is waiting for the chance to pull his plane out of his garage and fly it again.

If you are on Samso, I highly recommend dropping in for a chat, they are lovely and have some wonderful Italian food and wine products.