Timothy Ettridge

$200 Crab Cake

2011-05-21T21:06:00.026-04:00

"The $100 Hamburger" is an old expression pilots use to convey the idea of flying somewhere for no real reason other than to joyfully exercise the ability to fly. While there, they'll stop in at the local airport grill (a fading concept, to say the least) and buy a hamburger, then fly back home. Considering the fuel costs and fixed costs amortized over every hour of flight of one's airplane (tie down fees, maintenance, insurance, and more), the assumption is that the pilot spent around $100 just to get that hamburger. And they'd do again over and over.

It doesn't cost $100 anymore, however.

New to airplane ownership, it wasn't until today that I finally took the opportunity to fly to another airport simply because I could.

Venice Beach, on Florida's gulf coast, is place many friends I know fly to from where I live at Quest Hang Gliding Airpark (formerly an old cropduster airport, officially known as Sheets Airfield). They either do so assuredly, with powered aircraft, or with limited success in a hang glider.

Two other popular flying destinations in this part of Florida are Chalet Suzanne to the south or Cedar Key to the north west. Both, however, have fields a little too tight for my comfort (and underpowered airplane). So I chose Venice Beach for my first adventure in $100 hamburgers and used my iPad to plan a route from Leesburg, where I keep my plane (as Quest Airpark is also a little too tight for my level of experience with this plane).

I set in three airports as waypoints to give me a gentle curve to the east that avoided Tampa's airspace. First up was an airport across the street from Quest, one that would give me a nice view of Quest (the blue dot) out my left seat window on the way down. Secondly was the airport in Lakeland, home of each April's Sun n' Fun Airshow (perhaps the second largest air show in the country). This last April was the first time I visited it and I was curious what the field would look like now, empty, when last April it had been overrun with aircraft and cars.

Thirdly, and almost reluctantly, I chose Hidden River as my last waypoint. It's a private airport community that I'd only heard of because it's mentioned now and then on the The Uncontrolled Air Space Podcast (UCAP), to which I regularly listen. It comes up so often because it's the home of Jeb, one of the podcast's hosts.

Even though Hidden River would be a perfect waypoint for me, I chose it hesitantly because it seemed almost voyeuristic of me to be peering down on the home of a celebrity of sorts (to me, at least), someone I'd met and shook hands with at last April's Sun n' Fun.

Because of plans formed and commitments made long before I decided to buy an airplane last summer, I've spent eight months overseas during this first year of owning an airplane. Furthermore, in just a week I'll leave for another summer in Europe.

The plane has, then, been severely under-utilized, something I hope to make up for this fall once I'm back. Further adding to it's neglect has been my focus on getting a multi-engine rating in the ten weeks I've been home since returning from Australia. A few days ago I took my own plane up for two hours of just flying around, immersing myself in the newly acquired joy that I could fly whenever I wanted, and so I just floated around, gazing from above at this or that or anything else that interested me.

To make some practical use of the time, I maintained a specific altitude and power setting during the entire flight so that I could start gathering data on my engine's fuel consumption under various conditions. This is something it's Pilot's Operating Handbook spells out in great detail but, with a 42 year old aircraft, is unlikely to have much bearing on reality now.

This morning I drove the short drive to Leesburg, preflighted the plane and topped off the fuel, then departed south for Venice Beach and a hamburger. First waypoint up was Osborn, the airport across the street. Passing over it, I watched Quest Airpark drift by on my left, a sight I'd seen for hours on end while hang gliding. I was more interest in what was next; Lakeland.

Though my navigation waypoint was oriented to a point in the center of the airfield, I purposely drifted right so that I could view the airport in it's entirety from the window to my left. I was cruising 2000 feet above the airport's airspace ceiling so I didn't need to talk to the tower to overfly, but I still tuned it in to listen to what was happening in Lakeland's vicinity.

Having spent the major part of four very happy days last April on a small section of its grounds where the airshow displays were focused (the corner centered in the bottom of the picture with many trees), I felt a great sense of nostalgia viewing it as I was from the air, even though the memories were only a month old. There Dolores and I strolled among the warbirds. There we sat on the grass and watched the airshow, there I met the UCAP gang...

The home airport (and actual home) of Jeb, one of the UCAP gang, was up next. As I approached it, the CAVU day (Ceiling Absolute, Visibility Unlimited) was turning into the typical Florida summer afternoon; heavily developing clouds that often turn into thunderstorms.

By the time I got to Hidden River, I felt somewhat self conscious about wondering just where it was that Jeb might live. Some features are mentioned often enough on the podcast (a small lake, a particular kind of building) that if I really looked, I could probably figure out which house was his. Because of this, I almost felt it appropriate to avert my gaze, so to speak, and use only my GPS and iPad (running Foreflight navigation software) to confirm I had, in fact, reached the waypoint.

If anyone truly perused my own blog, they, too, could probably figure out just exactly which door to knock on if they really wanted to meet me or, perhaps, know which door to open to take my...my...uh...my books? My couch? Since my computer and iPad travel with me, probably the only thing worth taking in my home when I'm traveling is my espresso maker. If it turns out that someone really needs it, I suppose I could get another.

One of the reasons I live here, however, despite a greater longing for a cooler climate (and mountains...and running streams...and snow in the winter...and...and...) is something that most likely would prevent such an occurrence of theft. It's not just an airport, it's a community of hang glider pilots and tow pilots and people who "get it," as I've heard many pilots say about other pilots. We love waking up in the morning the sound of a 582 or a 912 (if you don't get that, you won't get it). Anyone walking up to my door, therefore, will be noticed by anyone...and everyone knows everyone...and knows who should and shouldn't be walking up to my door when I'm not here. It's like a gated community without the gate. People who've flown all their lives fly around as if they were walking to the mail box and back. People who've never flown anything smaller than an airline all their lives fly in something not much more than four tubes and a big patch of sail cloth, and send squeals of delight cascading down the atmosphere to where I'm sitting with a cup of coffee under my awning on a summer morning.

I politely averted my gaze as Jeb's airport neared. More to the point, the developing clouds had forced me to drop from my comfortable (and cool) altitude of 4500 down to 2500 just to get under them. Furthermore, I was only 12nm from Venice, an airport busy with student pilots and other aircraft that I could already hear repeatedly on the airport's frequency. I'd been monitoring it for the last ten minutes and was surprised at the volume of traffic. At Hidden River, low and that close to Venice, I was too busy looking forward, left and right for traffic to gaze at the ground.

And then, there it was. Venice Beach; soon to be home of my first $100 hamburger.

I landed and went into an airport cafe next to where I tied down my airplane. Sharky's on the Pier (visible on the coast on the left in the full sized version of the above picture) had been my intended goal but, one, it was a two mile walk around the airport's perimeter and, two, the developing clouds were worrying me. A phone call to the flight weather briefer worried me even more. He mentioned the possibility of thunderstorms back up at Leesburg. I'm glad I came down, I thought, but now I want to go...not hurriedly, but certainly not with my intended sense of leisure that would include a walk down to Sharky's and back. So I sat down in the airport cafe and, not really enthused about a hamburger, ordered a crabcake instead. My bill was $11. I left a $2 tip and went to fuel up my airplane.

Fuel for the round trip was $101.14. Add $13 for the crab cake and iced tea and you get $114.14. The hourly fixed cost on my Cessna 150J is hard to pin down this early in the game but a fair estimate might be $35. So, with 2.5 hours of flight time, the full cost of that crab cake might be closer to $200 than not.

Back home at Quest, I twittered: Had my first $100 hamburger today, but it was actually a crab cake and fuel alone was $101. Maybe, all told, $100 hamburgers are now $200.

Jack H., one of the podcasters from UCAP, responded directly to me; I'm afraid that "$100 hamburger" went the way of "shave and a haircut two bits."

I answered; Still, even at $200, it was a small thrill, coming so late in my flying career (40 years).

There's only about two days between now and my departure for Switzerland on June 1st when I'd have the chance to try this again, and earlier in the day so that I could make it to the beach and back before the thunderstorms threaten. If I can, I'll do it.

It's a new kind of thrill for me, being able to experience days like this. On one hand, I regret that it took so long for me to get to this point. On the other, and more significantly, I'm just so thrilled that I did get to this point.

Life is good.

Ich Lebe Noch

2011-04-09T23:56:00.009-04:00

When I was stationed in Germany in the Air Force between 1977-80, I lived in a small apartment sharing a wall with my landlords, a delightful couple with a teenage son and daughter. Many times, when I'd have been gone for an extended period some military-related trip and would reappear back at home, the mother, upon first seeing me, would always warmly say, "Ach, Du lebst noch."

Ah, you're still alive.

This came to mind because Zhenya wrote me a few days ago;

The other day I've got a letter from one of my blog readers, and he wrote:
"When I got interested in Hang gliding I started following your blog, Johnny Durand’s blog, Jamie Sheldon’s blog and Timothy Ettridge’s blog. I enjoy them all; yours in particular, but Timothy Ettridge has not posted in his blog since August 1st 2010. I enjoy his blog because he writes just like Earnest Hemingway (my favorite author) and I enjoy his stories. Has anything happened to him or is he just taking time off?"
You see, people get worried about you!

I'm very honored. So...whomever you are; ja, ich lebe noch.

Has it really been eight months? As much as I'd wanted to fill in this gap and others in the past with the tales of what I've experienced, I always first think of all the stories that I've yet to tell before I write about current ones. Contemplating the enormous size of the task of catching up, however, ends up keeping me from writing about anything at all.

So, in lieu of those full stories, I'll hurdle that obstacle with a quick summary of that eight-month gap.

August '10
Joined Dolores and others in Tolmin, Slovenia for the Kobala Hang Gliding Open...

...then spent time with Zhenya, Yulia, and others at one of Europe's biggest hang gliding centers; Greifenburg, Austria...

September '10
Hung out (and flew) with Matjaz, Nena, and sometimes even Lara in Nova Gorcia, Slovenia...

...then went with Yulia to fly in the Dolomites in Italy.

Octiber '10
Returned to the States to pick up the plane I'd bought in Oklahoma...

...and fly it home.

November '10
Drove up to Arlington, Virginia to have Thanksgiving (cooked by my daughter, Raine)...

...with (clockwise, l. to r.) Gus, Susan, Max, Mom, Raine, and Nina.

December '10
Returned to Australia to meet up with Dolores...

...and her daughter Ashanta, and later Ashanta's boyfriend Fredy for a month of flying and car camping.

January '11
Was involved in the Forbes hang gliding meet...

...and car-camped some more with Dolores before she returned to Switzerland.

February '11
Hung out with Scott and Monica a week in Newcastle (with a bit of flying) and then went down to Stanwell Park (hang gliding heaven central to me), where I was visited by my daughter Raine...

...who got in a great flight with Curt (video here).

March '11
Flew to Queenstown, New Zealand with John and Lisa to relearn my long-neglected paragliding skills...

...and had an absolute blast doing so.

April '11
Came back to the States, where Dolores joined me and we visited the week-long Sun 'n Fun airshow...

...which included a spectacular night airshow one evening.

And that's just the quick summary. So much more happened.

(Glad to know people care.)

Umbria

2010-08-09T11:10:00.013-04:00

I think it was about a year ago (just after getting back to the States last fall) that Jamie excitedly told me that Monte Cucco had been selected as the site for the 2011 World Hang Gliding Championship. Monte Cucco is a hill above the small town of Sigillo in the Umbria region of Italy, a place we both knew well and loved. As the competition would be in August of 2011, the "pre-Worlds" (the dress rehearsal of the competition to iron out problems) would be in August of 2010.

Furthermore, Jamie eagerly added, the Italian meet director had asked her to come over and be a staff member for both the pre-Worlds in 2010 and the Worlds in 2011. "Soooo...." she concluded, "why don't you and I just make of full summer of hang gliding around Europe in 2010 and 2011?!"

You'd think Jamie was my girlfriend, seeing how much influence she seemingly has over my plans each year. It's just that we travel well together and she comes up with some really great ideas all the time (like our adventure in Peru in November of 2008). It's hard to say no.

This, then, is how I ended up buying a used car in Europe last May to provide me with both cost-effective transportation and a home of sorts for this and next summer (half the time I'm sleeping in the back). I now own a high-mileage car on three continents.

These trips are centered around this and next year's competitions in Italy but, hey, while I'm here, I'm going to enjoy the whole continent. Everything of these last three months, then, has basically been just a prelude to being here in Italy

I think it was sometime last January in Australia that I was standing with Jonny (from Australia) and Corinna (from Germany) when it occurred to me I hadn't really given myself a job for the pre-worlds in Italy. Both of them would be there and so I offered to drive for them, something I often do for both.

Jonny had found a B&B to house the entire Australian contingency (six) and there was room for me as well, so I chose to forgo roughing it in my car. It was well I did. This farmhouse was unbelievably beautiful and our husband-and-wife hosts became great friends. The farmhouse had just finished a ten year period of renovation (we seemed to be their first guests ever) after it had been damaged and condemned in an earthquake just over a decade ago. It was spectacular, full of ancient oak beams and stone walls (photo at the top and below).

On the two days when conditions weren't conducive to competition and no tasks had been called, Jonny switched our roles and drove me up the hill to fly while he drove my car back down to meet me at the landing field.

The beauty of Monte Cucco is that it is one of easiest and safest hills from which to launch. It has huge, smooth, and gently sloping grass fields, so big that if you could run 200 meters before actually being required to take off (a rare luxury). You could even change your mind altogether after ten seconds of running and abort the launch and end up with nothing worse than grass stains on your pants. In some extreme cases (Mt. Buffalo, Australia or San Cassiano, Italy; two places I have seen but did not fly), the consequence of not committing to a launch the moment it's started can be death.

On the Sunday after the competition ended and before I'd left for my next destination, the conditions were perfect for top-landing. I went up and had a blast! You could launch, fly around, then land exactly where you'd just taken off, and either move off the launch to the side to set the glider down for a rest or merely take a few steps forward and lift off again. Zhenya was there and, having already top landed, took a photograph of one of my numerous relaunches.

Jonny is known for his dedication to producing daily videos during competitions (such as this one from the first day of the pre-worlds Italy). On one of the non-competing days when Jonny took me up the hill to fly, he attached his camera to my glider and, later down at a cafe, trimmed the footage on his laptop down to a three minute video in the time it took me to sip a coffee as I sat next to him.

What I love about this film (below) is that it shows two of my favorite aspects of hang gliding. First, when you launch, you just run a bit, then the glider lifts off your shoulders, then it plucks you off the earth as the ground falls away and, there you are. You're flying. The simple and natural aspect of this appeals to some side of me. Then, after drifting around in the sky for as long as you wish (or, if the lift is weak, for as long as you can), you simply come down and take your feet out of the harness and step back onto the ground.

In truth, it can be more complicated than that. Of all serious accidents, I'd estimate that 70% occur on take off and 25% occur on landing while only 5% or even less occur in flight.

Then again, most often it really can be that uncomplicated. We fly simply because we choose to and, most importantly, we can.

Silver Linings

2010-07-25T12:14:00.002-04:00

Following the Europeans in Àger, the plan had been to jump up to Basel Switzerland on my way to Sigillo, Italy (site of the next adventure) for a unique 25/50/75 birthday party for Ashanta, Dolores, and Dolores' mother. A puzzling oil leak developing with my car, however (purchased for this and next summer's extensive plans in Europe) dimmed my confidence in its ability to make the high speed all-night drive this would require to arrive on time.

So instead, once it was fixed, I opted take the time to slowly limp to Laragne, France ("B" below), gauging the car's health at every gas stop.

Laragne is a place I'd thought I'd said goodbye to last July, after the 2009 World Championships (part of last summers string of adventures so full that I've never gotten around to writing about them). After what felt like so much time spent there over the last two summers, it seemed I'd never have a reason to return. The coincidence of it being very close to the geographical midpoint of long journey gave me a reason. At midnight, I drove into the hang gliding campground (a landing field is half of the facility) and fell asleep in the back of my station wagon. I felt very much like I'd come home.

In the morning, the proprietor greeted me like an old friend.

I was actually particularly exhausted. Driving for the Dutch team, in addition to being as much fun as I'd known it would be, had also been surprisingly hard work. Most days I'd spent six-eight hours in my car climbing up and down mountain roads full of switchbacks, extracting my half of the Dutch team out of very hard to reach places. Sometimes I wouldn't get back to headquarters until 10:30 p.m.

For that first day, I was content to do nothing but sit and read, raising my head to stare at the mountains now and then.

High winds were pummeling the region, keeping the local pilots down. The result was a show for us cloud connoisseurs that would rival the double rainbow internet meme (if you don't get it, you won't get it). Lenticulars were building in layers above us during the day and, most spectacularly, during the moonlight night. While I could capture the daylight show, I could not capture the night's.

Lenticulars (if you don't know about them, read more about them here) are stationary, forming on their leading edge as fast as they dissipate on their trailing edge...and yet they are dynamic, too. They change shapes and forms subtly so that a glance back at a clould you saw ten minutes before will be, as they say in Thailand, "same same but different."

Many times that first night (when the winds were the strongest and the moonlight the brightest), I would see people outside with their heads craned skyward, stopped in their tracks and mesmerized by the moonlight phenomena.

Àger, Spain

2010-07-21T08:52:00.008-04:00

The European Hang Gliding Championships were in Spain this year and, after spending a week here last year, I planned to return. I really had no reason to be there beyond the desire to return to a place where I knew many of my friends would be and that I'd felt I really hadn't had enough of a chance to explore the last time around.

Also, the two owners of the Port d' Àger, a newly renovated hotel I'd randomly found on the internet last year became such good friends that I wanted to come back simply to stay with them once more. Jordi and David, two brothers from Barcelona, had taken a huge chance on their belief in the beauty of their region and, ignoring the world economic downturn, had gone heavily into debt to buy and renovate an old farmhouse into a beautiful hotel and restaurant. Their bank tells them that they are among the small percentage of clients who makes their payments on time. I admire that kind of courage and success and, in addition to all the other reasons, I wanted to return to Àger if for no other reason than to make my small contribution to their solvency.

Last May, just after arriving in Germany, it only then occurred to me I had no real job at the competition in Àger. I was sipping coffee with Dutch friend Daphne when this thought came to me, so I turned to her and asked if the Dutch team needed a driver.

This was how I came to be one of the two drivers for the Dutch team.

Like any hang gliding meet, it's always a great time for me to be around great friends; Slovenes, Russians, Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Aussies and Colombians (even at the European championships), and more.

Davos, Switzerland

2010-07-08T20:18:00.001-04:00

Working my way down south from Finland to Spain, I stopped in Basel to stay with the Swiss to help with a construction project. I worked just long enough to realize how unaccustomed my body and bones had become to real work (the sledgehammer-swinging, dust-snorting, bricks-falling-on-feet kind) when they called a break to go fly at Davos (photos above and below).

One just has to marvel at not only the rarity of a mother-daughter hang gliding team but of the unending beauty of Switzerland.

A few more days of dusty sledgehammer-swinging and I was off to to Spain.

Changes in Latitude, No Change in Attitude

2010-06-30T06:19:00.031-04:00

I've always had a particular interest in northern cultures, especially in northern Europe. I've had extensive experiences in Iceland, Denmark, and Norway, a few experiences in northern Russia and, over the years, have had a few scattered days in Sweden. Until ten days ago, however, I had never set foot in Finland.

In the manner that the seemingly random aspect of my life typically unfolds, I stumbled across Finnish friend Virpi a few weeks ago while passing through Switzerland. Neither Jamie nor I had any real plans or commitments between the World Championships in Germany that ended on the 23rd of May, and the European Championships in Spain that begin on the 11th of July, so we had pondered the idea of spending the last half of June together in Norway. I've always enjoyed Norway (the little bit of competency in the Danish language I still have can pass for Norwegian, too). Most importantly, Jamie has yet to visit there.

When I mentioned our vague plans to Virpi, she suggested we instead join her and her boyfriend Kari at the Finnish National Hanggliding Championships in Jämijärvi (it's not near as complicated to pronounce as it looks).

When I mentioned the idea of Finland instead of Norway to Jamie, she decided that, rather than any kind of northern experience at all, she needed heat and sun more than anything else. So she opted to jump on a cheap flight to Malta while I e-mailed my commitment to the Finnish meet organizer to be part of his ground crew.

As a result of the opportunities provided me by being stationed in Germany in the Air Force right out of college in 1977, by 1980 there were only two countries I hadn't visited in western Europe (i.e., west of the now happily defunct Iron Curtain); Finland and Portugal. The intervening years had yet to change that status.

Arriving with Virpi and Kari by ferry into a Helsinki port a few days before the competition began, they headed one direction for some family commitments while I headed another to explore a bit on my own (armed with a list of suggestions from them). We met up in Jämijärvi a day later.

During the next week I spent the first part of each day either studying Finnish history online or taking short trips to nearby sites of interest to me. In the afternoons I would retrieve pilots who'd hadn't made it back to the airport.

The evenings were spent first the sauna, and then often enough afterwards gathered around a fire in a circular hut with the center of it's roof open over the fire, roasting sausages long into the next day (though I rarely made it past midnight).

These two photos were taken at 11:00 p.m. at the post competition sausage roast at an open fire that would accommodate the crowd (the circular huts were too small).

It never really got much darker than this every night I was in Finland.

Kari won the competition, becoming the Finnish Champion for the second time. The "SM"on the cake stands for Suomen Mestari; Finnish Champion

In Finland, towing by ultralights is not yet legal (and may never be) so Finns have made do with car towing. Though I had all my hang gliding equipment with me and I was given many opportunities to give it a try, a few emotional scars apparently just couldn't be overcome. The friend who taught me to car tow 15 years ago was killed only weeks later while attempting to teach someone else. Aero-towing merely makes me attentive. Foot launching makes me nervous, something I've been working to overcome this last year with more and more experience (as I've written). Car towing, however, has always just simply scared the heebie jeebies out of me.

Apparently it still does. A time or two I thought I was emotionally ready but in the end I chose to pass on every opportunity I had to fly in Finland, hoping I'd feel more up to the next day. That day never came.

No matter. The real reason I was there was to finally get the chance to explore Finland, and to do so in the company of good friends.

Two years ago, six weeks in Russia resulted in my consumption of more vodka in that month and a half than I had sampled in the previous 34 years of being of drinking age. Similarly, this trip to Finland has resulted in my experiencing more saunas than I probably have had in all my life before.

Sauna is, as most probably already know, a Finnish word to begin with. I did not experience one single Finnish dwelling that did not have an extensive and complete sauna facility (sauna, changing room, and rinsing room, and more).

Though there were no frozen lakes to dip into through a hole in the ice as I had experienced in Russia five years ago (and no lake at all in Jämijärvi), I still was happy to drop into the merely chilly lake (17 degrees Celsius) at Virpi's family's summer cottage house. We spent a few days there before heading back to Europe on the 29th.

Finland seemed so related to places I've been in recent years, but that shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Looking on a map, it all makes sense.

While the earth changes dramatically traveling south to north (as I experienced by changing 1800 straight line kilometers of latitude from Borso del Grappa in Italy to Jämijärvi), the make of the land can be quite consistent east to west. Yulia's childhood home in Velikiy Dvor, of which Finland reminded me, was almost directly east from Jämijärvi, less than 800 kilometers way. Oslo, which seemed to carry much of the same feel as Helsinki, was almost directly west, again only 800 kilometers away.

In all my travels around the world, I am again and again struck by how much both the Earth itself and we as a people are far more alike than different.

On Foot in Italy

2010-06-14T11:58:00.006-04:00

I learned to fly sailplanes when I was 14, forty years ago. In all that time since, being towed into the air by another airplane has seemed the most natural way to fly. Though I first learned hang gliding by foot launching on the dunes of Kittyhawk 18 years ago, it wasn't long before all the hang gliding I did was aerotowing in either Marlyand or Florida.

Foot launching, then, has always intimidated me. The opposite is usually true for most hang glider pilots. They are intimidated by the high energy of being towed that seems to always be searching to find a way to go out of control. So we laugh at each other's concepts (misconceptions?) and do it the way we feel best.

So many of the most amazing hanggliding sites I've visited in Europe of the last eight years in the process of crewing for friends have been foot launch sites, something I last felt qualified to do 15 years ago. I've envied my friends as they flew above spectacular mountain ranges so I spent some time in last fall in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, re-learning foot launching so that I could fly where I wanted in both Australia last winter (summer there) and now here in Europe.

The fruits of this effort have begun to show, both in Slovenia last week and now, here, in Borso del Grappa, Italy. After I left Slovenia, I met up with Jamie and Carl, who'd left England the week before to drop down to the continent for a bit of warm weather flying before Carl returned to work on his oil rig.

If you'd care to see what kind of adventures flying couples get to have together, read Jamie's article on their epic flight there.

Monday Jamie and I joined up with Amy, a friend from the States passing through Italy, for a bit of hiking in the Dolomites around San Martino di Castrozza. When the clouds parted now and then, we had great views of stunning rocky crags. Amy and Jamie seemed more intent about the mountain's flowers, however.

Most na Soči

2010-06-09T17:14:00.009-04:00

Driving from Austria to Slovenia takes one through a corner of Italy before descending into a spectacular network of valleys. I came here to be with two friends, Matjaz and Nena.

Their home has a terrace overlooking the blue waters of the Soča river. Their town, Most na Soči, means "Bridge on the River Soča."

I finally got the chance to fly for the first time here. Matjaz and I launched seconds apart late in the day and drifted over the spectacular valley in the diminishing light. The camera I'd set up on the back of my glider (visible in the photo below) took only a few pictures while I was still on the ground before it shut down, but Nena captured the moment for me.

Last spring here, while snow still covered the tops of the 2000 meter peaks nearby, Matjaz captured a flight on video that he made from this hill we flew off. Edited it down to six minutes, it's set to the evocative music of the movie "Avatar." I don't know how many times I've watched it but it must be at least 50 times. To me it captures the stunning beauty of this sport of hang gliding. It is so simple, the way we fly, and yet so profound in its expression of the often forgotten unlimited nature of our existence. We can fly. We truly can. Matjaz takes off a small hill as casually as if descending a few stairs, and finds the right air currents to climb, climb, and climb until he is soaring across the pyramid-shaped face of the snow-covered Krn Mountain.

We can do amazing things, we human beings.

Run, Forrest! Run!

2010-06-06T05:01:00.016-04:00

This last week in, around, and above Zell am See, Austria has had me thinking over and over again of a line from the movie Forrest Gump;

"And so I met the president...again."

When the hugely significant becomes commonplace, it's hard not to trivialize it.

Looking around me each day, I find myself thinking, "Here I am amidst some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet...again."

There's a small hang gliding competition going on.

I'm here not to fly, nor even crew for someone, but merely to be with friends who are (such Belgian Jochen and Russian Yulia pictured here).

A bit of reflection revealed that all of the hang gliding competitions I was involved with last summer and will be or already have been this summer are centered around Austria in a manner of sorts. There's Áger, Spain (near Barcelona) to the west, as is Laragne, France (near Nice) and several places in Switzerland. To the south in Italy there is Bassano Del Grappa (near Milan) and Monte Cucco (closer to Rome). To the east, there is Tolmin, Slovenia (near Ljubljana). To the north in Germany, there is Tegelberg (near Munich).

I've spent last summer, then, and will spend this summer crisscrossing Austria on my way to or from some hang gliding site. This means a lot of time of driving through breathtaking mountains and unbelievably quaint and inviting villages...again.

Something about this has inspired me, apparently. Finally I've actually been able to motivate myself to start running again in the mornings...down manicured trails through majestic and whispering forests, in view of a horizon of white-capped peaks. I'd imagine it's hard not to feel inspired here.

Swiss Mix

2010-06-01T04:26:00.009-04:00

My Swiss friends invited me to join them in their country for a mixture of hang gliding competitions and just simple hospitality. Freddy and Ashanta live in Oberdorf, near Stans, the kind of place probably most of us imagine when we think of Switzerland (just above the top of the tree in the lower center of this photo taken from the summit of Bürgenstock).

Jürg and Dolores live in Basel; one of Switzerland's major cities and yet it remains as inviting as a village.

I'll be back here several times over the summer. It often feels like a dream to be there strolling those streets and paths, though I can't say if it's natural beauty or the dear friends that make it such a magnificent place for me. Probably both.

At least I, for one, had fun

2010-05-23T04:17:00.011-04:00

The 2010 World Championships never happened. Out of 14 days scheduled for competition, not a single one provided weather good enough for a flyable task. For 80 of the world's best pilots pilots who traveled from around the globe, it was a bitter disappointment.

Each day either the cloudbase was too low (often lower than the launch ramp on Tegelberg), or the wind was too strong, or it was raining, or it was snowing, or storms threatened from one side or another...always something. On only a few days was the weather good enough for the pilots to even merely launch for a short, local flight. Down below in the valley, it was green and spring time. Up on the launch ramp, however, it was more winter than anything else.

For me, however, it was still a great time. With so many of my best friends in the world all in one place, what's to complain about?

I'd fall asleep each night contentedly exhausted, and wake still too tired to go for the morning run I'd been claiming for weeks that I'd finally start doing again.

On our last day there, Daphne attached a GoPro camera to her foot and held her regular camera in her hand to combine the footage for the video below of our ride down the summer time toboggan run. Such was how we occupied ourselves on the on the ground.

Here's a glimpse of the other days:

...with benefits

2010-05-13T12:53:00.017-04:00

One of the benefits of being involved in hang gliding competitions around the world is that, since most hang gliding involves leaping off a mountain, I get to experience some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet.

Right now I'm in Schwangau, Germany, better known as the location of the Neuschwanstein Castle, the inspiration for Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle.

I'm here to drive for (l. to r.) Daphne, from the Netherlands, Claudia, from Columbia, and fellow American Jamie. The three of them are competing in one of the three classes of World Hang Gliding Championship running concurrently off of Tegelberg, a mountain just out of view of the Neuschwanstein castle. They also have been my companions (both individually and as a group) of many adventures over these last years.

Those are just three, however, of perhaps 30 people I know taking part in this competition, of which close to 15 could even be termed some of my closest friends. The other night while sitting at a table, literally squeezed left and right between the affectionate shoulders of Swiss mother and daughter Dolores and Ashanta (pictured here later in the evening with Zhenya as well), I could not help but gratefully contemplate my blessings of human compassion in my life.

Last Sunday, May 9th, was the last practice day before the competition began. I attached a camera to Yulia's hang glider and set it to take a picture every two seconds for what she knew would be just a short flight. It began to rain just before she landed so that by the time she came down over the Neuschwanstein castle, rain drops had spotted the lens cover.

Rain has been a problem. Of the four days that have passed since the competition began on Monday, the 10th, none have been flyable. Yesterday, however, a German pilot found a small window of opportunity for a personal flight and strapped a camera onto his glider. Daphne took the trouble to edit his 27 minutes of footage down to a three minute glimpse of the beauty of flight, this region, and Neuschwanstein.

Through the Eyes of Yet Another

2010-05-04T08:24:00.001-04:00

I was only in the States for five weeks, three of them spent delightedly hosting Yulia for the period surrounding Florida’s two spring hang gliding competitions.

As recorded a year ago, I spent the previous spring doing much of the same with Zhenya. Over the last two years I've had many adventures with both Yulia and Zhenya overseas (such as my trip to Velikiy Dvor in northern Russia with Yulia recorded here). It's always good to have the chance to return the hospitality I've been shown in so many different countries by so many different people.

The trip to the States was short, however. We both departed May 5th for Germany; her to compete in the World Hang Gliding Championships, me to join her and other friends at that competition as a way to begin a full summer of plans overseas.

Money is a renewable resource, time isn't

2010-03-22T21:39:00.003-04:00

I'm home, arriving this morning in Orlando at 5:30 a.m., where Jamie picked me up. You've just got to love a friend who will rise at 4:30 a.m. to pick you up at a place an hour from their home and then drive you to a place yet another hour beyond.

Jamie hung out as long as I could stay awake (until 2:00 p.m.) then made the two hour drive back to her home on the coast just below Cape Canaveral.

This evening (awake again) I've just read her blog entry posted yesterday in which she comments,

Science Daily reported recently that buying life experiences is much more likely to produce long-term happiness than buying material possessions.

No wonder I always feel so overwhelmingly blessed.

I live in a trailer (when I'm not living in a tent or a car or on somebody's couch). I've just spent five months in Australia and only brought back a couple of hand-made mugs from Beechmountain Pottery and a really cool 12 volt portable shower pump (thanks, Scott!).

Ah...but the experiences. Priceless.

Life is good.

Strzelecki Lookout

2010-03-15T05:57:00.009-04:00

Okay...so maybe I'm not finished with my Australian adventures just yet. Scott and I scoured the local sites this afternoon and found that only at Strzelecki Lookout were the winds were right.

I launched first and Scott soon followed. In the air I found that Scott, one of world's top pilots, was doing everything but flying backwards to get some in-flight pictures for me.

A few more days of errands, goodbyes and such, and I'm off to the USA...for only about five weeks.

Yengo National Park

2010-03-14T21:55:00.001-04:00

Biamie, the Aboriginal's creation god

For my last adventure in Australia before returning home, Scott took me for a weekend of camping and mountain biking just west of Newcastle. Here I had the chance to view a side of aboriginal culture that few non-Aussies get to witness; the stone carvings and cave paintings of Yengo National Park.

These aren't historical sites you'd find in a guide book. In fact, Scott pointed out that there usually weren't any signs indicating where a road lead until you'd driven a small distance down it. You had to know what you wanted to see and where it was beforehand.

To view the cave depicted in this photo, Scott parked at a campground and, after we set up our tents, suggested we go for a walk before it got dark. We moved to one end of the parking lot and, after Scott indicated to me that a path started where we stood (I never would have seen it), he said, "You go first." After I'd walked a very short distance, he said, "You missed it." I turned around to see him indicating a cave only a few meters off the path I'd just walked.

If you don't know someone who knows, you'd never find any of these fascinating sites. Scott believes this is intentional, designed to protect these culturally significant sites from the fools such as the ones who'd carved their initials next to aboriginal art thousands of years old.

Yengo Mountain, Biamie's stepping stone to heaven.

Bathurst

2010-03-08T19:01:00.011-05:00

I picked up Chris at the Sydney airport at the crack of dawn Saturday, returning from her assignment with the U.N. in Chad, Africa. After three months of austerity on a level most of us cannot conceive, her first thought was fresh seafood fresh seafood fresh seafood.

We went straight from the airport to the fish market in Sydney and filled a eski ('cooler' in the States) full of seafood to consume over the next few days. The first order of business upon reaching her home here in Bathurst was a feast of prawns, oysters, crabs, and something I'd never seen before called Balmain bugs (next to the crab in the photo). They were kind of like small legless, armless, clawless lobsters with less taste.

These last few days have been unusually rainy, leaving Chris content to rest, recover, and slowly reabsorb the joy of her own home. I'm content to read, study, and write and enjoy her company for a bit before my last few adventures in Australia finish up and I head home.

I'm a bit sad to have missed all the snow in the northern hemisphere this winter that I've been reading about (be it in the States or Europe). Even so, these days of endless gentle rain here in the comfort (both spiritual and physical) of Chris' home have left me in much the same peaceful mood so exquisitely depicted in this beautiful movie of snow in Moscow.

Brighton-Le-Sands

2010-03-05T23:27:00.005-05:00

Friday night, after flying back from the Gold Coast, I resumed my living-in-a-car existence and drove to Brighton-Le-Sands, a small town on the other side of Botany Bay from Sydney's airport. There I could spend the night on the street in my car and be well placed to pick up Chris the next morning upon her return from Africa.

Strolling the beach along Botany Bay in the evening's light rain before I turned in for the night, I found a place that seemed most fitting to enjoy a glass or two of wine.

I most often prefer to spend as much of my time as possible in a setting like Jonny's home town of Beechmont: in simple buildings surrounded by forests and hills with perhaps a significant city no closer than an hour away. There are times, however, when being amidst a conflagration of civilization actually does appeal to me. There are some places/settings/feelings than cannot exist without a massed population to justify them. So often, lately, I've thought about how much I miss something like a good dinner with a good friend on a sidewalk cafe on a summer night on Washington, D.C.'s Connecticut Avenue, just north of Rock Creek. Ah...city life.

Sitting alone tonight in Australia's late summer amongst the subdued ambiance of an exquisite restaurant, I got a hint of that feeling. Additionally, I felt a great sense of my good fortune in life to experience such moments in such diverse places around the world. Opposite me out an open window the sand was only a few meters away with a tranquil bay of seawater at its edge. The quiet and almost non-existent lapping of the bay's water on the narrow beach running along to my left was equally as evocative a kind of music as was the murmur of peaceful conversation all around me to my right.

I was alone but I didn't mind. Perhaps it would have been impossible to coordinate my emotions of the moment with another. Solitude, while not particularly sought, does occasionally have it's advantages.

I don't know Sydney well but I do now know a place I'd return to on some summer night just to be there...just to sit...just to absorb a kind of energy that makes me feel blessed and content.

Australia's Gold Coast

2010-03-05T22:34:00.005-05:00

Until 2006, I'd never been to Australia. Until last November, my complete Australian experience was three visits to Fremantle.

As much as I enjoy Freo ("Fremantle" in local speak), so many other friends who've traveled in Australia or actually live here kept telling me that I haven't really seen Australia until I'd been to the east side.

One of the reasons for this extended stay here these last few months was to explore all the places I've been hearing about. Prime among these was Jonny's region; the Gold Coast.

The view above is from Jonny's back porch, looking down from Beechmont to the coastal city of Surfers Paradise. Below his parents, Jon Sr. and Judy stroll on Palm Beach, with Surfers Paradise in the background.

In addition to the natural beauty of the coast, hills, and water falls (photo at right: Purlingbrook), I was also fascinated by the ubiquity of grey headed flying foxes; huge fruit eating bats with wingspans over a meter wide. Months earlier one evening in Newcastle, I'd seen the sky full of them moving from their roosts to nearby fruit orchards. It looked like the flying monkey scene from the Wizard of Oz.

Jonny knew the location of a colony near Cannungra and took me there to see them.

There were hundreds in every tree I could see on both sides of the road for a few hundred meters. While Jonny and his sister Gemma remained in the car, anticipating a barrage of guano if they all took flight in the same instant, I walked down the road awestruck.

My stay was brief and, though I brought my hang gliding harness, the weather brought either pouring rain or adverse winds, so no flying was done. I did, however, get to at least see where I might have flown, had the conditions been right.

Beechmont launch

Byron Bay launch

Next time.

Boys Toys

2010-03-02T14:02:00.000-05:00

Scott and Monica hosted me once more for a long weekend of fun in Newcastle. One of the coolest things we had the chance to experience together snorkeling in a large tidal pool full of temporarily captive fish. It was like having one's own private aquarium as big as an Olympic pool.

The last time I was in Newcastle it was mid week, which limited Scott and Monica's ability to play. This time around I came on a weekend specifically to play, be it fly, swim, surf, sail, or whatever else came to our minds.

Two other friends of theirs from Germany, Ernst and Sylvia, just happened to be in the area as well so it was a weekend of a fivesome waking up in the mornings as a group and pondering just what kind of fun we would have that day.

Something I got to do that I've always wanted to try but haven't yet (on an imaginary list of probably 100 things) was welding. While Scott and I worked on a modified electric bike that he was constructing from various parts (some of which he was fabricating and welding himself), he gave me the chance to try to join two pieces of metal. I did, yet when I finished, he took one of the pieces in his right hand and pulled it off. "That's not welded." I tried again. Same result. I tried again. Same result. The fourth time I poured so much molten metal on the joint that the two pieces glowed for some time after I'd finished. When it cooled off enough to touch, Scott tried to separate them and couldn't. High fives. I'm a welder now. No matter that the two original pieces were distorted by all the heat they'd been forced to endure. They were welded.

Ah...boys and their simple pleasures.

The winds and weather didn't cooperate during the weekend but on my last day there, the morning I was flying out to Queensland's Goldcoast, everything lined up perfectly. Scott and I jumped in his car, let some air out of the tires, drove out onto the dunes near his house and squeezed in an hour or so of dune gooning on Redhead beach.

I had my own helmet in his car but once we set up his glider (mine is still being repaired), he just handed me his helmet and said, "Go."

Scott has created harnesses for both his cairn terrier and beagle that enables him to take one of them along on flights (hence, the helmet's ornamentation). Once airborne and horizontal, his dog will just climb onto his back and enjoy the ride.

We played until I blew a landing and broke a downtube. Scott, ever the gracious host, offered to run back to his garage to get another but my flight up north was only a few hours away. It was time to finish playing with all of our toys.

NSW Titles

2010-02-21T20:01:00.020-05:00

After so many years of supporting others who competed in hang gliding events, I've finally come to the point of wanting to compete in one. I've been flying sailplanes for 40 years ago (since I was 14), powered aircraft for 38 years, and hang gliders for 18 years. In all that time, however, I've only flown for the singular joy of the amazing experience of being up in the air, carving turns, climbs, and descents through space however I choose.

I'm not generally competitive by nature and perhaps even quite the opposite. Yet I do see the merit of bringing the best out of ourselves by competing against others. And so I set my glider up with 57 others in Manilla, Australia on the first day of the NSW Titles. In this competition, the highest placed finisher who is also a resident of the Australian state of New South Wales is declared the State Champion.

Being a bit too involved in the competition to take photos myself, every picture here and in the slide show below, excepting one (its identity will become obvious) was taken by my driver, Gaynor Schoeman.

Of the seven possible days of competition, the weather cooperated for five. I flew the first four but, having trashed my glider by landing in a tree, was forced to miss the fifth. In 51st of 58th place at that point, missing the last day altogether still only dropped me to 57th. I actually beat somebody.

Tree landings are not so terribly uncommon in hang gliding. I know someone who has had three in the last two years. They usually come about when an intense sense of competition overrules logic and judgment. As I'm not that competitive, there should be no reason I'd ever land in a tree. Or so I thought.

In retrospect, I can find at least six consecutive errors in judgment which compounded each one before it and concluded with me spending two and half hours hanging perilously 20m above the ground. It would take too long to explain all of them but one surprises me the most: excessive competitiveness, i.e., as I was so determined not to land, I stayed too long in a place that, from it's topography in relation to the current winds, should have provided me the lift I needed. It didn't and by the time I finally gave up, I was already trapped.

When I landed on the trees and seemed to be stable, I nevertheless shot my left hand out to the nearest significant branch I could find to hold on. An extension to my radio's PTT (push-to-talk button) is attached to my left index finger and activated by pressing my thumb against it. In grabbing the branch, I had also unknowingly pushed and held down the PTT. The pilots on my frequency (I was told with a laugh that evening) where treated to about twenty seconds of heavy breathing and profanities.

My dilemma was witnessed by many of the pilots waiting to launch on the ramp at the top of the mountain and some of those already in the air. Once I determined I was stable and finally released the grip on the branch to my left, this also released my PTT. Only then was Gaynor able to call me and ask if I was okay. Advised that I was, she and a friend of mine from Norway, Thor Landgraff, drove down to find me.

Once below me, Thor made the wise suggestion of deploying my parachute over the nearest major branch I could reach to ensure that, if the branch holding me gave way, I would not fall completely to the ground. Before I let the parachute go completely free, I made sure the bridle attaching it to my harness had enough wraps around the branch to ensure it would lock if I fell.

The most notable aspect of the rescue was Thor. I was so high in the tree that there were no substantial branches near me that anyone could climb. Furthermore, the local volunteer unit that responded within 30 minutes had the equipment and ropes needed to bring me down but weren't really up to the task of climbing the tree. The alternative was waiting for a ladder truck from the nearest major town's fire department (an hour away). Pondering this, Thor graciously volunteered to don a harness and climb the tree himself. He got to within five meters of me and, after a lot of effort, finally got a line to me.

It would have been a much bleaker afternoon and perhaps evening as well, had Thor not be there with his wisdom and enthusiasm.

So many lessons learned, some of them for the second time in as many months (e.g., how foolish it is to cling to the hope of lift while your options of escape diminish by the second). Though I still contend that the most dangerous thing I do is ride two-wheeled vehicles (responsible for three episodes of broken bones while all my other activities have left me free of injuries), I know I'm very lucky to have escaped this with nothing but ripped sailcloth and broken aluminum tubes.

The glider will be fixed in a week. I, on the other hand, have no consequence except a profound experience which hopefully taught me a thing or two (or six).

A Van Down by the River

2010-02-06T21:55:00.010-05:00

Coledale sunrise

I bought a Ford Falcon station wagon here in Australia just before Christmas. Though Chris has been so gracious as to give me her small Volkswagen to use while she's away in Africa (for almost the entire time I'm here in Australia), I still needed a car to which I could subject the typical abuse a hang gliding vehicle must endure...and one big enough to accommodate five people, five hang gliders, five flying harnesses, and more.

The Russians have been using it these last few weeks but now they all have gone home (excepting Zhenya, who's still working at the Moyes factory). So I've parked Chris' car back in her garage in Bathurst, caught the train to Sydney, took possession of my own car once more, and have begun living a kind of life I've been wanting to live for some time; that of a vagabond with means.

There's no shortage of friends here who would give me a place to sleep and, even if that weren't so, I could still afford to stay where I wanted. But what I wanted to experience was a life of chosen simplicity, something a bit like my year on a boat from '07-'08 as I circumnavigated the earth.

This time the goal is merely to experience various places I enjoy here in Australia with a sense of being as low maintenance as I can. So I park by the sea (different places each night so as not to be too intrusive into what are often residential streets) and sleep in the back on a pad, waking at sunrise without effort as the light begins to pour in.

This morning found me at Bronte Beach, north of the harbor. In the night I'd been woken by the sounds of heavy rain but, rather than being disturbed, it was actually very pleasing. When I woke, it was still raining. I left the car, barefoot and bare-chested, clad only in boardshorts, and walked along the beach in the warmth of the air and the coolness of the rain.

Bronte, like so many other beaches in Australia, has pool built at the edge of the surf that is, in effect, a man-made tidal pool. There is no need for plumbing, chemicals, pumps, or maintenance because the pool is naturally flushed out and cleaned each day at high tide.

It was high tide this morning just after I woke, it turns out, for time to time I watched the people swimming laps be momentarily disoriented by the waves that would breach the walls and pour foam and turbulence into the lanes.

I joined them for a while, swimming a few laps without goggles, opening my eyes in the saltwater to orientate myself as needed, then took a cold shower in the public showers nearby and strolled the beach once more, feeling strangely animal-like and natural, cool rain falling on my bare skin, content with the simplicity of my needs.

I dried my head and chest and put on a t-shirt (leaving my boardshorts to drip dry), then went to a coffee shop on Bronte Road to enjoy the feeling of cleanliness and warmth so simply attained while I sipped a latté, watching the rain continue to fall.

It was, in truth, an illusion I created for myself. Warmth and dryness were, if not just a car's door away, then also an open door away. Bill and Molly live in Bronte beach and it was nearly right in front of their home that I was living my private fantasy. All I needed, were I to feel any true sense of distress, was to simply knock on their door.

Still, I had the freedom to live this way and so I wanted to. Though I'll be at friend's homes from time to time as my final weeks in Australia come to a close, I'll also be living this way whenever I can.

Twelve years ago, before my daughter left to go to college, I had told her that once she moved out, I was going to move out, too, and live in a van down by the river, just like the Chris Farley's "Motivational Speaker" character.

It took a while, but I'm finally there.

Mt. Beauty, Australia

2010-01-25T19:26:00.018-05:00

This entire trip to Australia had many purposes and goals. All of them, however, grew out of the notion that the eastern part of Australia is home to two of the worlds most significant hang gliding competitions; Forbes Flatlands in the beginning of January, and The Bogong Cup just a few days later.

Bogong is the state of Victoria's highest mountain, on a ridge just outside of the town of Mt. Beauty. In terms of landscape, the seven hour drive south to here from Forbes in was like passing from Flagstaff, Arizona to Burlington, Vermont in the same amount of time. In the last two hours, as you drive up into the mountains, the land turns from dry and arid to a breathtakingly lush and verdant setting.

Mt. Beauty is a ski area, for pete's sake. I didn't even known any part of Australia actually had enough snow to ski. Mind you, it's no Aspen. From what I've seen and read, I'd equate the probable skiing conditions to northern Maryland (which means minimal at best). Still, it's more than I imagined possible in Australia.

Eight days had been allotted for tasks at this meet. Unlike Forbes, which is an aerotow comp, this was a hill launch one. Each morning the site with the best angle of winds (from four or five within a range of 30 kilometers to choose from) was selected and a caravan of cars and trucks loaded with hanggliders, pilots and drivers (like me), headed up the hills to set up and launch. A task was set, once the task committee reached the top of the hill and had both internet and visual references to contemplate, and the pilots were off.

Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate so agreeably as it had at Forbes. There we had eight straight days of flyable weather, with the ninth day and last day available cancelled, perhaps, more out of pilot exhaustion than anything else.

At Bogong, the pilots flew only two out of eight days.

As the driver for the same four Russians as I had been in Forbes (Zhenya, Yulia, Anton, and Marat), this gave me a lot of rest from my accumulated exhaustion of driving for many long and consecutive tasks at Forbes, where I would often cover three or four hundred kilometers down bad roads in the process of picking up the pilots along the way or at a distant goal, then not arrive home with them until close to midnight, unfed and too tired to do anything about it.

For the pilots, however, the imposed rest at Bogong was a rather frustrating time. They came to fly.

We amused ourselves with horseback rides, fishing trips to mountain lakes, and a number of other things that a resort area was quite ready to offer. One striking aspect I found was the ghosts of forests on several mountain tops, the sites of huge forest fires only two years back. Most of the structure of the trees had remained and, in those two years, the charred bark had fallen off to reveal sentinals of steel gray wood. From a few kilometers back in the valley, the hills looked as if covered with a silver fur. Up close, each individual sculture was hauntingly beautiful.

Of the perhaps 20 people who have made this Australian adventure such an amazing one, only a handful actually live here. The rest, now that the Bogong Cup is over, are heading back home to various countries around the world.

Originally, so was I. My three month tourist visa expires on January 31st. My request for an extension, however, as been approved. Though I've been allowed an extra three months, I do have commitments back in the States in late March, as well as many plans for April. This, then, gives me another seven weeks more to enjoy in Australia.

Down She Goes

2010-01-15T15:37:00.006-05:00

The boat I sailed around the world on from '07-'08, Uniquely Singapore, was renamed "Cork" when sponsored by Ireland for the '09-'10 edition of the race.

She is no more. The 21.7 meter (68 ft.) yacht sank here a day ago, during the race from Western Australia to Singapore.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8458382

I 'liberated' the ship's bell from her before I was the last to leave the boat at her homeport of Gosport, England. It's bolted to the wall of my temporary home (a trailer) in Florida. I suppose I should do something significant with it now.

Forbes Flatlands

2010-01-12T02:37:00.005-05:00

The Forbes Flatlands is the premier hang gliding competition in Australia. The conditions are so perfect and consistent that many days, by the time all four of my pilots had been retrieved and brought home, it was close to midnight. The next morning I'd wake up at dawn, go for a run if I had the energy (only 2/3 of the time) then head for my favorite coffee shop for good coffee and a simple breakfast, then head for the airfield for the beginning of the tasks.

That coffee shop indirectly provided me with the highlight of this week here (full of so many other good times). The daughter of the owner, Amy, took an interest in all the new people visiting her town and our activities, so I invited her to come to the airfield when she had a free day. She did and, as the events evolved, got to take a ride in a Bailey-Moyes Dragonfly with Bobby Bailey himself.

Her delight was unconcealable. Imagine if you'd never been flying at all and your first introduction to the air was in the front seat of an open cockpit ultralight, drifting along just above the tree tops with nothing around you but the warm, summer air. After they landed, Bobby told me she'd flown 90% of the flight herself.

My reward for being the mediator of her adventure was a week of the warmest smiles and energy whenever I'd come by the coffee shop and, perhaps, a life-long friend.

Such is the times I'm having here in Australia though, in truth, this has been the case for a string of countries over the last few years.

People. It's always about people.

I've neglecting having my camera at hand much of these last two weeks here so I'm relying on Ashanta's photos (except for the last one of her) in the slideshow below to give one a hint of the experience here.

Russian New Year in Australia

2010-01-01T10:17:00.001-05:00

l. to r., Yulia, Anton, Bobby, Zhenya, Marat, myself.

I ushered in the new decade at a campground just outside Forbes with the four Russians I'll be supporting in the up-coming competition at the airfield here. Just before midnight we were were joined by Bobby Bailey, designer of the Dragonfly ultralight that makes aero-towing possible for hang gliders and, therefore, competitions at sites like Forbes: flat but so full of the kind of lift that makes flights over 200 kilometers common.

One surprise the Russians had for me was a calendar published by Aeros, a Ukrainian hang gliding manufacturer. Seems pilots in Russia and Ukraine and a few other places will be staring at my butt for the entire month of May.

The photo was taken in Solvenia last August, where I knew many of the pilots, among them Claudia Mejia (pictured) from Colombia.

International Christmas

2009-12-26T09:17:00.001-05:00

One that always pleases me about the hang gliding community is how international it is. At various times over the last year. This Christmas was a perfect example. I spent Christmas Eve and morning with a group of four Swiss friends (mother, daughter, and their two boyfriends, l. to r. Fredy, Dolores, Ashanta, Jörg) and then spend the rest of Christmas day exploring a dune soaring site with (below, l. to r.) Zhenya (Russian), Noma (Japanese), Gerolf (Austria) and Kathryn (Irish).

This December has been one of as full of flight as I could ever fantasize, be it from cliff sites like Stanwell Park, where one flies hundreds of meters above the surf, or at dune soaring sites, such as Redhead Beach near Newcastle, where I flew with my wingtip only a meter or two away from the sloping sand dunes, then choosing to stop and hover, then levitate back down to earth whenever I chose.

With all my time in the air and even more among the best of friends, this has been one month of endless days of happiness; hanging out with Curt and Louise in Stanwell, Scott and Monica in Newcastle, the Swiss, and so many others.

Stanwell Park, Australia

2009-12-03T17:34:00.002-05:00

I had a two hour flight yesterday off of Stanwell Park's Bald Hill, cruising up and down dramatic cliffs pounded by exploding surf 700 meters below me. Absolutely stunning. Absolutely glorious.

Zhenya was there, too, in her new job as a test pilot for the Moyes factory. She was testing a prototype of the smaller version (for women and lightweight men) of the same glider I just bought.

Though I took the photos above, I didn't make the video below. But it was made at the same place I flew. Take it's five minute length and multiply it times 24 and you'll have an idea of the amazing experience I had yesterday.

Today was a bit of simpler fun: dune gooning at Wollongong beach (90 minutes south of Sydney). I made this short video of Curt surfing the wave in the air off the bushes at the end of the dune.

Timmy's in the Oz Report

2009-11-29T20:35:00.017-05:00

I just bought a new glider. The full story is in the Oz Report (details below).

Somewhat embarrassingly, I now own three hang gliders. They each have different roles, however. One is like a top-of-the-line road bike from a few years back, built for the best speed and performance at the time but, in today's technology, only well above average in performance. Another is like a very good mountain bike; capable enough but sacrificing speed and a bit of performance for strength and durability.

This new one like a beach cruiser; as simple as a glider gets because sometimes simplicity is an advantage.

Davis Straub's Oz Report is probably the most widely read hang gliding e-zine on the internet. It began perhaps ten years ago when Davis, an American hang glider pilot, was traveling and competing in Australia. He started putting posts on the internet to keep his friend back home informed and, once back home, began posting on news-worthy events in the States as well. Eventually anyone in the world with anything to say about free flight (or a few other of Davis' special interests, such as going barefoot and internet technology) need only send Davis an e-mail. More likely than not it would appear verbatim on the Oz report.

I've long been submitting pictures for Davis, as I'm usually free to photograph what most pilots are too busy being involved in to record.

An odd experience (pleasing, I suppose, if not surprising) I've had lately that first occurred last summer at the World Hang Gliding Championship in France last summer is that someone I've just met in a hang gliding related activity and chatted with briefly will ask me, "Wait a minute. What's your full name, Tim?"
"Timothy Ettridge"
"Oh, yes. So you're Tim Ettridge. I've heard of you."
"Really?" I've always asked. "How?"
"I don't know," is the usual answer I'll get. "I just have. Something to do with hang gliding, I suppose."

My only plausible explanation is a subliminal recollection of the byline of photos I've submitted to Davis over the years, as well as my reoccurring appearance in Jamie's blog, which many hang glider pilots read as well.

Recently I opened the Oz report index of back issues to discover this:

Issue #236 ^(Nov.26): Happy Oxytocin * Atlantique Delta Race - the video * Tracking down a rumor * Tim Ettridge becalmed at Gulgong * Gordo, video

This was new. I'm actually the subject in the Oz report?

The story is this. A low-slung three wheeled land sailer was always sitting by the clubhouse at the Gulgong competition where the pilot briefings where held in the mornings, as well as escape the searing sun while waiting to launch.

On most days there wasn't enough wind to get it moving. In that picture you'll see my hand on the wheel. I'm trying to get it rolling by pushing on the wheel so that, once it starts moving, it's momentum might be enough for the wind to keep it moving. Usually this wasn't possible. I was, in fact, becalmed most of the time.

There were three days during the seven days of competition, however, where the tasks were canceled because of too much wind. And on those days, I could hope in the land sailer and zoom around all over the field. It became kind of an indication, then, of the likelihood of a task. If I could get that thing rolling on it's own, it meant that it was probably going to be too windy to launch or fly. Me being becalmed was a good thing.

A recent experience while flying here taught me a few valuable lessons I thought worthwhile to share. The same episode led to my purchase of a glider.

The full story is here, in the Oz Report.

Kid in a Candy Store

2009-11-26T22:18:00.008-05:00

I'm based now in Bathurst, Australia at the home of my friend Chris, with whom I spent last Christmas in Haiti. Her home, a two hour drive west of Sydney, is happily situated in the very center of everything I want to do in my remaining two months in Australia. The next two competitions are either a three hour drive west or a two hour drive southwest. Additionally, some of the best hang gliding sites in the world are a few hours drive southeast on the coast.

Months ago, Chris generously invited me to use her home as a base in between each of my forays out into a different area of New South Wales. Only days after I arrived here, however, she was unexpectedly given an three month assignment in Chad, Africa by the U.N.

My role now is not so much a guest but a caretaker in a very quiet house.

After taking Chris to the airport, I took the chance to spend a few days with friends in Sydney, as well as visiting the Moyes Hang Glider Factory.

Other than Francis Rogallo, who invented the aerodynamic shape that evolved into the first hang gliders, probably no other name is more well known in hang gliding than Bill Moyes. In the '60s, Bill was instrumental in the development of a foot-launched and free flying glider originally based on water skiing kites towed behind boats. He opened up his own factory in the early '70s. Not only are his gliders still considered to be among the world's best, his son Steve eventually became a world champion in hang gliding championships.

In the 80's he teamed with American designer Bobby Bailey to develop what's now known as the Moyes-Bailey Dragonfly, the first ultralight powerful enough to tow a hang glider and yet able to fly slow enough to make being towed something even low time pilots could learn. Last spring Zhenya had the chance to be instructed in how to fly one by Bobby Bailey himself (here).

The Dragonfly transformed the sport of hang gliding, taking away the need for a hill to foot launch off of and allowed hang glider pilots to fly wherever the lift was best. This opened up the possibility of world record distance flights (currently over 700 km) in places like the south of Texas and permanent hang glider flight parks in the flatlands of Florida, such as the one where I now live (though I'm rarely actually there).

Walking among the endless rows of tools, machinery, and clearly recognizable hang glider and Dragonfly parts, I felt like a kid in a candy store.

Is it hot enough for you yet?

2009-11-21T22:31:00.011-05:00

Flying over Gulgong, Australia a few days ago with Scott Barret in a trike (a two seat powered hang glider), it felt so easy to imagine I was cruising a few hundred meters above the Serengeti plain in Africa. Even though we're still in the last weeks of spring down here in the southern hemisphere, I could see that the vegetation had lost most of the green it had when I first arrived in Australia's east coast two weeks ago.

With close cropped grass and many eucalyptus trees randomly scattered across most paddocks below me as we flew around the dry landscape, I half expected to find zebras and antelope below.

I'm here in Australia to be involved in a string of hang gliding competitions that span their summer, mostly in a supporting role for various friends (Russian, Swiss, and Australian) but perhaps I might even fly and compete in one myself. One thing is for certain, however. I will take the opportunity to fly here, even if it means I've got to buy a third hang glider (I've got two back in the States) to do it. Hopefully I can find a simpler solution.

This last week once more I've been the ground crew for Jonny, as well as Hungary's Attila and two of Jonny's friends here in Australia that I hadn't met before.

Strong winds ended up forcing the cancellation the task on three of the seven days allotted for the competition. I took those opportunities to explore the neighboring countryside or, as below, make use of a land boat that could only be coaxed to roll over the grass when the wind was too strong for flying.

As with any hang gliding competition, the event is as much about spending time with friends (both old and new) as it is about darting about in the air at cloud base for hours on end, sometimes covering more than 200 kilometers in the process.

One thing I couldn't understand, however, was how hot everyone kept claiming it to be when all one needed to feel comfortable was shade and a breeze, both of which were available most of the time. "Is it hot enough for ya?" I'd hear from both friends and strangers on the street. You think this is hot, I kept thinking to myself (and occasionally voicing), then come to Florida anytime from June to September.

My Favorite Places on Earth, Part II

2009-11-03T20:42:00.002-05:00

I've written of this feeling before, here. Once more I find myself in a place that makes my shoulders settle pleasingly in relief with that feeling of being at home, even though not at home.

Fremantle, Australia and in particular this one coffee shop, The Merchant on South Terrace Street, represents a small slice of a grand adventure of my life; not only my involvement in several different kinds world class ocean racing events, but the kind of traveling I've somehow found myself unwittingly but happily flung into these last five years or so.

The first time I passed by The Merchant once in town, it was full and overflowing with people onto the sidewalk tables. It was a Sunday, one of the first warm and sunny ones of this boreal spring. I waited a day to enter it to relive memories. Late Monday morning, it was as empty and as welcoming as I'd always remembered it.

I am home (for a week).

The World's Best At Anything

2009-11-02T22:22:00.003-05:00

Years ago a friend visited me in Groveland, Florida one spring during the height of an international hang gliding competition. Perhaps ten of us left the airfield one night to eat dinner at a restaurant. From the comfort of our seats I took her around the table, explaining who was who.

"That's Manfred, from Austria, who's been World Champion a few times and who is pretty much unchallenged as the best hang glider pilot in the world. That's Oleg, from the Ukraine. If he's in a competition and Manfred doesn't win it, Oleg will. That's Christian, from Italy, current World Champion in the Class V hang glider subcategory. That's Alex, also from Italy, who was World Champion before Christian. That's Kari, three times Women's World Champion, that's Corinna, who has been World Champion twice in the past..."

My friend interrupted me and, with a clear tone of feigned indifference, ask, "And I should be impressed because....?" She looked at me, seemingly satisfied with her wit, and waited for my answer.

She had a point, yes, but I thought I did, too. "How often," I responded, "do you ever get to meet the world's best at anything?" She had no reply but just nodded her head in contemplation.

It's often been a source of amazement to me at how I've somehow found myself rubbing shoulders with the international elite of the hang gliding world. My explanation has always been that I know Jamie and Jamie knows everybody. Still, it seems a privilege to have found myself in the company of the people I have these last five years.

Somehow this same luck has followed me over into the sailing world, where I've found myself sharing beers, working shoulder to shoulder, and having heart-to-heart talks with the elite of the ocean sailboat racing world.

I met Dilip Donde, from Mumbai, India, in September of 2006 while working on Sir Robin Knox-Johnston's shore crew for his solo round the world yacht race. The two are polar opposites. When Robin strides into a room, his confidence and even arrogance takes over. A web article aptly describes Dilip thus:

Sometimes the most quiet and unassuming people do the most amazing things. Commander Dilip Donde is one such person. He’s quiet and sparse, his language and manner without any unnecessary flourishes and frills. Perhaps if you saw him in a crowd, your gaze would stop at him for a moment, and then pass on.

And yet he is now posed to become the first of his nationality to sail solo around the world. Already he has surpassed the sailing achievements of any one individual from India.

I am no Robin, that much I know for sure. But I'd really like to think that I am very much of the same mettle as someone as kind and gentle as Dilip. And so to see him following his dream and actually making it happen inspires me far more than the exploits of more typical headline makers.

It reminds me of the time I had the chance to meet and chat with John Denver many years ago. He was one of the most well known pop musicians of the 70's and yet in person he was no different than anyone I knew...except that he'd sold millions of records.

Who we choose to become does, at times, truly seem to be within the scope of whatever our will has the confidence to manifest, nothing more. This thought inspires me greatly.

A week ago Dilip noticed my comment on Facebook that I would be coming to Australia and wrote me, inquiring when and where. It turned out that we had, by a good stroke of luck, we had just a few hours of overlap between my arrival in Fremantle and his departure from it for a 5000 kilometer sail to New Zealand. I warned him that, having just recovered from a mysterious illness in Thailand, I might not be the best person to have contact with just before departing solo onto the ocean for a month. He countered, however, with, "Don't worry about infecting me with tropical viruses! I have developed a natural immunity since the last 42 yrs!"

We had the time for a tour of his boat and a bit of catching up before a small crowd showed up to bid him farewell.

I was happy to be in Fremantle, happier still to be there to send off a good man on the next leg of his accomplishment.

You can follow Dilip's progress at http://sagarparikrama.blogspot.com/

Hot Thai

2009-10-31T12:37:00.004-04:00

The plan had long been to spend much of this winter in Australia (summer for them) for the hang gliding competition season. The question had been just how much time and when to actually show up. When Gay invited me to join her for a week in Thailand at the conclusion of her own vacation there with her daughter, the answer was found.

We met in Phuket on October 24rd, upon which I was whisked immediately into a waiting car, and driven around the Phang Nga Bay to Krabi. There we waded out to the boarding ladders of a long-tailed boat to be ferried to a small resort on Railay Bay West.

We spent the rest of that day and the next swimming and rock climbing (a first for Gay) and contemplating scuba and other plans for our other days there and elsewhere in Thailand.

On my second night in Thailand, however, I woke in a sweat and spend my remaining five days there fighting a fever, peaking a few times at 39.4C, seeing little else than the linens in my face and occasional blurry views of the ceilings.

So much for my philosophy of willing illness away. Gay, far more pragmatic, came equipped with a medical kit sufficient for anything short of minor surgery and lovingly took care of my useless slumping lump of a body for the rest of the trip.

We did manage a few days in the north in the city of Chiang Rai, but I saw little more than my pillow.

Still, of what I saw, it was beautiful.

Mind the Gap, Part II

2009-10-22T00:55:00.001-04:00

Yes, there's about a five month gap here, of which only June through August has stories to tell. Someday this space here will be filled in with tales of:

France...

Spain...

Turkey...

Slovenia...

and Austria.

Until then, time moves on.

East Coast Championships

2009-06-06T21:59:00.000-04:00

Annnapolis

My last adventure with Zhenya before she returned to Russia and I headed to France was one more hang gliding competition; the East Coast Championships in Ridgely, Maryland.

Ridgely is only 60-90 minutes drive from Annapolis or Washington, D.C. to the west and Ocean City or Rehoboth, Deleware and other beach resort cities to the east. In the end, we visited all of them on the days when weather did not allow flying (dragging New York state resident Dana along on the quick and rain-drenched tour of DC, the first visit to the nation's capitol for both the Russian and the American).

In Ridgely, Zhenya was her usual amicable and popular self with this new crowd of people. As she wrote herself afterwards in her own bi-lingual blog:

Each time, coming to a new location, you look around and everything seems strange, but you know that in a couple of days you will love this place. Then you will leave, cry, and be bit envious of those who remain. And maybe they envy you ....
Well, it's ok, so much fun ahead:)

Slide show below.

Turning the tables

2009-05-29T21:54:00.010-04:00

We've returned to my trailer in Florida for a week before heading north to Ridgely, Maryland for Zhenya's last competition in the States, after which she'll return to Russia.

Zhenya has dedicated her final days at this airpark to learning to fly the Dragonfly, something in which only two months ago she was thrilled to simply get a ride.

She soloed two days ago. Her instructor even made of movie about the event (found here.) Afterwards she given carte blanche to take one up whenever she chose. Believe me, she chose often.

This morning she rose so early to fly that not another soul was stirring on the airport. After pulling a Dragonfly out of the hangar and preparing it for flight, she returned to my trailer and poked her head in.

"Can you come out in a bit and make sure I'm still alive?" Usually there had been many Dragonfly-qualified people about to passively oversee her flying but not this morning. I understood her concern and, once I'd make a cup of coffee, I walked out to the grass runway carrying the coffee in one hand and dragging a chair in the other. I sat down just off the side of the runway to take a few pictures of her alone in flight. After a few landings and take offs, she taxied over to me. "Do you want to take some pictures?" she asked.
"Yes, I am," I said. "I've taken quite a few while you land."
"No," she said. "I mean up there. Do you want to come along?" She nodded her head towards the empty back seat.

I've been flying aircraft since I was 14 and, though I've never been checked out in a Dragonfly, I have no doubt I could fly it right now without instruction. That's the logic. The emotion of that moment, however, was very, very different. It felt like I was being offered a ride on the back of an eagle's wings where my faith was far more important than my skills.

Our twenty minutes of darting between and around the low clouds of that morning felt like the ride of a lifetime to me. It felt like the greatest dance I have ever shared with anyone. Moreover, the tables had been turned. It was a gift to me...the gift of flight I'd been giving others ever since I got my license on my 16th birthday.

Life is good.

Coast to Coast

2009-05-20T09:39:00.011-04:00

Zhenya and I had planned to head to Schwängau in southern Germany right after the Jamie's Flytec Race & Rally so that Zhenya could participate in the Pre-Worlds, the warm up competition the precedes the actual Women's World Hang Gliding Championship at the same location by a year. Logistical issues, however, seemed to dictate there would be a good chance Zhenya's glider wouldn't make it there in time for her to compete until the last two days of the meet, and perhaps not at all. So we canceled a slew of airline tickets and opted to head to San Diego instead, where Zhenya could join Jonny Durand in participating in the Torrey Pines Gliderport Flight Fest.

When Jamie, who lived and worked many years in San Diego, heard of our change of plans, she was quick to change her own and join us.

Zhenya's good friend Mita (the familiar form of Dimitri, as Zhenya is the familiar form of Evgeniya) makes the fifth person we've crammed into a hotel room for two. When I met him last October back in Chelyabinsk, Russia, he talked of his plans of coming to the States for four months, long before Zhenya even pondered the idea. By a coincidence of events, he had selected San Diego as his destination and, by a further coincidence of timing, Zhenya and I were able to pick him up at the airport.

The five of us, hang glider pilots all, are now enjoying the combined pleasures of both a familiar (Jamie and I) and a new (Jonny, Zhenya, and Mita) location. Only Jonny and Zhenya are flying, however. The rest of us are happy to just share the company, location, and spirit.

Flytec Race and Rally

2009-05-05T18:31:00.021-04:00

Russia's Zhenya Laritskaya and Australia's Jonny Durand ready to launch

We're in the middle of the second competition that brought Zhenya to Florida; the Flytec Race and Rally, conceived of and organized by Jamie. Flytec produces the most popular hanggliding instrument.

This unique event stages each successive task every morning from the airport that had served as the previous day's goal. In this manner, this competition is working its way north from La Belle, Florida, the location of last week's competition, to Lookout Mountain in the southeast corner of Tennessee, home of one of the east coast's most well-known hanggliding sites.

Jamie, in addition to running the meet, is driving for her boyfriend Carl and two other friends. I'm far less ambitious, content to drive for Zhenya alone. Often Jamie and I will use our GPS navigators to locate Starbucks along the route where we can track our respective charges (using SPoTs: Satellite Personal Trackers).

David Glover, who is assisting Jamie with running this meet, made the video below of the second day of competition. Among other things, it makes gentle fun of the morning Zhenya set up her glider wearing a white bikini.

Here's a video made by Australian competitor Jonny Durand (top ranked pilot in the world at the moment), much of it filmed while in flight. It gives you a fair sense of what the competition is like, both on the ground and in the air.

Here's another short one by David Glover that also gives a feel for the competitions.

Here's five minute video of a few of the competition's better pilots filmed by the helmet-mounted videocam of Bobby Bailey. Bobby is the designer of the Dragonfly, the first ultralight with both enough power as well as the ability to fly slow enough that opened up the possibilities of hang glider aero-towing. This, in turn, truly opened up all the possibilities of hang gliding in general.

Bobby is one of the few pilots that hang glider pilots would trust to fly close enough to film this kind of footage. Jeff O'Brian is the pilot who drags his leg on the lake before landing. Zhenya makes a few appearances both in the front seat of Bobby's Dragonfly and in her own hang glider in the air. The loops and spins filmed at close hand are of Jonny Durand, who is probably the only hang glider pilot Bobby trusts to do such things so close to him. Though it's easy to miss, early in the video Bobby even flies close enough to Jonny to touch his wingtip.

Lastly, here's a :33 video of Jeff dragging his foot across the lake, taken from the ground. You'll see Bobby in his dragonfly in hot pursuit. If nothing else, you might get a feel for how casual flight is to so many people who frequent this airport. A general aviation airport is like a small military establishment with rules, procedures, lines not to be crossed, and the threat of law hanging over everyone's head. Here it's like a skateboard park with everyone flinging themselves into the sky with abandonment, thoroughly enjoying the discovery of what else they can do that they haven't done before. I've seen two people killed here, one just 100 meters from where I stood during an act of recklessness that we all unfortunately encouraged, and one from a freak accident that felt more like the random act of chance than anything that could have been avoided.

Still, we all love to fly. It's about living.

Through the Eyes of Another

2009-04-29T10:10:00.024-04:00

Zhenya flew into Orlando on April 12th. It's her first trip to the States. She's here for almost a full month; ten days of preparation and two separate week-long hang gliding competitions. We are in the middle of the first, on the edge of Lake Okeechobee, Florida.

Hosting her has been an unbelievable treat. Being able to witness and experience her enthusiasm for adventure and all things new is like being both with a golden retriever who loves everybody and whom everybody loves, and with a wild horse crashing through the waves of the surf.

Even if you don't speak Russian, her spirit is still evident in her blog.

Zhenya's was delighted to escape from the last vestiges of a Siberian winter and fly directly into the heat and sunshine of Florida in April. In all of our journeys around the state, we usually drive with the top down, her face often obscured by her billowing hair.

Last winter while conversing online, I mentioned that the way her hair fell on her shoulders last summer as she ran around the various European hang gliding competitions (where we met) often reminded me of the majestic beauty of the mane of a horse.

"Like this?" she responded and sent me this photo.

It's hard not to like someone who refuses to take themselves too seriously.

Mind the Gap

2009-04-27T08:19:00.003-04:00

A few months ago a friend in Spain wondered why my blog had fallen silent. I told her that I was too busy doing so many things to have the time to post them. She responded, "You do it right, enjoy the moment, carpe diem!!!"

There is a hug gap and perhaps four notable adventures between the previous post about Iceland and the one before it about Russia (Sailing down the coast of Florida, Cuzco and Machu Picchu in Peru, Christmas in Haiti, New Year's in Norway).

In the next few months I intend to fill that gap...slowly.

Returning to the Past

2009-03-31T08:24:00.008-04:00

Rekjavik, Iceland

I lived in Iceland from April of '80 to April of '81, during my last of four years in the Air Force. I had a remarkable experience in that year, unlike most other military personnel stationed there who seemed to be simply waiting to go home.

Being stationed there was considered a hardship, a "remote assignment," something that most people were asked to do only once or twice in a 20 year career. I, on the other hand, volunteered to go. It was a unique chance to live in a Scandinavian culture (a life-long interest for me). Once there, I bought a used car. This, in addition to my minor knowledge of Danish (the second language in Iceland) allowed me to make the most of this chance to explore Iceland.

I'd always wanted to go back.

Last Summer my English friend and former "Saga Insurance" team mate Charlie was pondering an unusual way for her and her boyfriend Jake to celebrate their 21st birthdays, both at the end of March. Somehow the idea of Iceland came up and somehow I got invited to join the adventure.

Boy, do I love my life. With friends like this, how could I ever be bored.

We rented a car and set out to circumnavigate the entire island counter-clockwise, with a day or two in Reykjavik at the beginning and end.

In my year in Iceland in the installation we called "Rockville," not far from Keflavik on the tip of a rocky peninsula, the summers were never that hot and the winters never that cold. Any snow fall was small and would melt away in a few days. Such, I had thought, was the way it was in all of Iceland. Icelanders say, with accuracy, that Iceland is green and Greenland is ice. Yes, but in the north in late March, we would discover, it is still very much a land of snow and bitter cold.

One goal for both Charlie and Jake was to witness the Northern Lights for the first time. When I lived there a year, I had many opportunities to witness spectacular light shows in the sky, often while soaking in a natural hot springs pool in a lava field. Sunspot activity was at a lull during our adventure and, however, so the best we got to see was a dim green glow on the northern-most horizon two nights out of our week there.

Jake put together this video the one night we decided to drive a small distance from our hostel in Vik to find a clear northern horizon and brave the huge drop in temperature in the evening to stand outside our car to steady our cameras on the roof for long exposures.

The last thing I did before heading home was to drive out to the small Air Force Station where I spent a year of my life. The entire station consisted of perhaps 100 enlisted personnel and 10 officers, I among them. Our job was to use our radar to monitor Soviet aircraft (always Tupolev bombers) flying between Russia and Cuba. I was an Intercept officer, guiding our fighters on their intercept until they could see the target aircraft themselves with their own radar. Our fighters would escort the bombers through our NATO air space, both parties offering friendly waves and taking photographs, and then head back to Iceland.

The end of the cold war ended the necessity of this mission so my small station was decommisioned years ago. It's still visible in this Google Map satellite photo but, much to my chagrin, it has since been razed to the ground.

All that's left are the concrete foundations.

I took a picture for my daughter's sake of what was left my small Officer's Quarters where she was conceived (above).

I can hear her now, thousands of miles away, repeatedly punching her index finger on an imaginary button and saying, "Eeewww. Daaaaaaad!! Ding ding ding ding ding!TMI! TMI! (Too Much Information!)

Moments later I returned the rental car to the international airport a few kilometers away and boarded my plane to fly home.

New Year's in Norway

2009-01-09T09:27:00.005-05:00

Zhenya and I had been looking for a place to get together and, glancing at a map, it seemed that Norway was a good halfway point between my home on the U.S.'s east coast and hers in the middle of Russia, just east of the Ural Mountains.

Since I've always been looking for an excuse to return to Norway in winter after spending two months there many years ago, we decided to meet in Oslo for New Year's Eve and then head out into the country for a few days of skiing.

Though Zhenya lives on the southern edge of Siberia and has certainly had her share of snow, she'd never tried skiing before. After the first day, I was so astounded at her progress that I stopped taking pictures and started making a video to capture it.

Below is the evidence of her obvious natural athletic ability.

Christmas in Haiti

2008-12-30T08:09:00.008-05:00

Aussie friend Chris, who works for the U.N., found herself on a short assignment in Haiti just just a few weeks before I'd moved into my trailer in Florida in mid December. Suddenly she was not only not half way around the world, she was just a short flight away. The opportunity to spend Christmas together seemed obvious.

This makes it my third tropical Christmas in a row, after having spent Christmas of 2006 and 2007 in Fremantle, Australia.

I'd never been to Haiti before and found it a land of desparation. Chris works with food distribution in areas of deep poverty and I was able to witness such in levels I'd never seen before, not even in Nepal.

On the brighter side, it is a tropical island, after all, and Chris' smile is perhaps the brightest I've ever seen in my life. We had many good times in Port-au-Prince, and started our own tradition of a pina colada before anything else every evening of the week I was there.

I also joined her co-workers (of every nationality imaginable, including one country in Africa I'd never heard of before) on a cookout on a nearby beach. A bevy of children full of bright smiles swarmed around us half way through the day, focusing on Chris (no fools, they), looking for nothing but our happy energy given back.

Cuzco and Machu Picchu

2008-11-21T07:47:00.003-05:00

Jamie was in Ecuador for a hang gliding meet when she met Gry, a woman from Bergen, Norway. A quick friendship ensued and when Jamie learned Gry intended to head for Cuzco and Machu Picchu in Peru next, Jamie admitted it was something she'd always wanted to do. "I know someone who would love to join us," Jamie added.

"On such short notice?" Gry asked.
"Watch this," Jamie answered and pulled out her iphone.

Six thousand miles away, as GW and I were sailing south, I got her text message: "What are you doing the next two weeks? Wanna join me and a new friend in Peru?"

I'd already planned to be in Lake Tahoe the next week with Carrie so Jamie and Gry trekked without me in the Cordilla Blanca, Peru's stunning 6000m mountain range.

We met the following week in the ancient city of Cuzco, the step-off point for most journeys to Machu Picchu.

For years I'd dreamed of being in Cuzco. I read John Hemming's Conquest of the Inca's with fascination while spending the winter of '05 in Ecuador. My enthusiam for the idea of walking the streets of Cuzco myself, imagining the history I'd read so much about while passing between 1000 year old Inca stonework, might equate to a Christian pilgrim's feeling about walking the streets of Jerusalem.

Gry, besides her native Norwegian and English, was fluent in Spanish as well, having spent the previous six months working in an Bolivian orphanage. This made her an exceptional travel companion. Jamie and I got to ride on the coattails of her organization and knowledge, giving us the option many times over to be spontaneous and alter our plans and route towards the ultimate goal of our visit: the ancient city of Machu Picchu. Discovered underneath dense jungle vegetation in 1911, it has been painstakingly cleared to as close to it's majestic glory as modern archeologists can surmise.

Farmland outside the city of Cusco

Jamie and I have vague plans to return next fall to extend the four day trek she and Gry undertook in the Cordilla Blanca into a nine day trek.

My photos:

Jamie's collection of photos:

Where to Live?

2008-11-11T21:10:00.001-05:00

One of the first priorities this fall, now that I'm back in the States, was to visit Carrie in her new, post Clipper Ventures home: Lake Tahoe.

I had never been there before but, after only an extended weekend, this entire region ranks up there (right next to Spain's Bizkaia) as my kind of place to live. Florida is just a place to have a base for now, but not really the place I want to make my home.

Having Yosemite National Park just around the corner doesn't hurt, either.

A Bit of Serenity

2008-11-05T14:53:00.002-05:00

G.W. had contacted me while I was still in Russia to see if I would be free in early November to help him reposition his boat, "Serenity" from his home near Daytona to Key Largo. He's done the route many times alone but it's always good to have a second hand aboard. It's always good to spend time on a boat with good friends, too.

Unlike me, Gdub is a life-long sailor and yet he holds my sailing skills in high regard because of my circumnavigation in the Clipper Ventures race. That's kind and flattering but it's like me being part of a team that built a steel skyscraper but if you want a kitchen cabinet built, Gdub's your man. Personally, I think it's a bit more useful to be able to build a kitchen cabinet than a steel skyscraper.

Much of the voyage was spent inside the Inter Coastal Waterway, a most natural inland waterway that's lined with both humble homes and palatial spreads.

Our time scheduled allowed us to anchor each night except the last of our five day journey. To me, this is a luxury after spending up to 26 days at sea on a continuous four hours on/four hours off schedule.

Best of all, it was a great chance to spend long hours with one of the better human beings I know. Gdub is the one who told me that most of the best people he's met in life are the one's he's met in hang gliding. I'd have to agree.

Челябинск (Chelyabinsk)

2008-10-01T18:20:00.000-04:00

I'm still in Russia, having been in Челябинск (Chelyabinsk) these last two weeks.

Chelyabinsk is about 1600 kilometers due east of Moscow, deep into the main body of the huge Russian landmass. This is considered Asia since the city lies just over a hundred kilometers east of the Ural Mountains, the arbitrary eastern limit of Europe.

The other day at a small store here, when the cashier saw that I needed my friend Anya to translate the amount I owed, she asked Anya, “Where is he from?”
“America.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Traveling,” Anya responded, not feeling particularly obliged to be any more detailed.
“Traveling here?!” the cashier asked with an incredulous look.

No foreigner, I suppose, would venture this deep into Russia without good reason. I do have one, however. Great friends.

I’ve often said that my friendship with Sveta, whom I met in Virginia in March of 2004, is truly one of the 10 best things that have ever happened in my life. What the other nine are, I’ve never bothered to define other than my daughter clearly being the first.

Through my friendship with Sveta, so many good things have happened in my life, be they other new friends, experiences, or places. Is it coincidence or relevant that the extreme contentment of these last four years of my life have also been the years I’ve known Sveta? She always brings such spontaneity, energy, and exuberance into anything.

Some of those blessings are my past and present experiences here in Chelyabinsk, Russia, where Sveta grew up. When she returned to visit her family in January 2005, I joined her and was delighted to feel as welcomed into the fold as if I’d been adopted. It was here that I met and became such good friends with all her family, particularly her older sister Anya, who is fluent in English.

(I must pause to comment how lucky I’ve been throughout the world in being the beneficiary of the linguistic abilities of so many others. My feeble attempts in studying various languages over the years…partially successful in a few, laughably hopeless in others…is in some measure an expression of my gratitude.)

Odd as it may sound for someone who’s been leisurely wandering around the world for a few years, lately I felt like I’ve needed a vacation of sorts. What I’ve really wanted to do is just sit still for a while. I’ve been doing so much here and there since the Clipper Ventures race ended in Liverpool early last July. Right now, then, I am so very happy to have been doing very little of significance here during these weeks in Chelyabinsk, other than enjoying these old friends and even new ones.

When I met Zhenya in Italy last July where she was competing in the World Hanggliding Championships, she was almost speechless when she learned I’d actually been to her hometown of Chelyabinsk. I suppose it would be like an American meeting a Russian while in Europe who'd been to his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. It's a major city, yes, but not a place many venture without a specific reason.

Zhenya and I got to share some time here over these last two weeks as well.

I've been staying with Ludmila, Sveta and Anya's mother, who doesn’t speak much English but we've still had such a great time together. I've learned more Russian from her these last two weeks than from all the time I've spent over the years with all my other Russian friends combined. She and I will sit at her kitchen table, each with our Russian/American dictionary in one hand and a shot glass in the other, talking about different issues while we thumb through our dictionaries for the appropriate word. Now and then we'll try to come up with new toasts for which we can take a shot of vodka (“Never more than three per evening,” is our mutually agreed upon rule).

The first toast is always to one’s health and the third is always to love, leaving the second as the only opportunity for creativity. Our most common toasts are to her granddaughter (Sveta's daughter) and to friendship (be it personal or Russian/American).

I’ve never been particularly fond of anything as strong as vodka and even less fond of drinking something by throwing it down my throat, but I’ve found that between all the shots I’ve downed between my time this month in Moscow, Velikiy Dvor, and now Chelyabinsk, I actually have grown almost fond of the bitter, tangy taste of Vodka that you can experience if you sip it very slowly.

If only I could get them to let me sip it slowly to enjoy it.

It’s been a sublimely beautiful time here for me, one that has evolved in a different sort of way from how this summer’s other adventures have unfolded. It’s been peaceful, quiet, relaxing, loving, spiritual, and uplifting in a way hard to describe. At one extreme, I've joined Anya and her friends out in the city one night while some of them practiced their mildly illegal art of "fireshow" on an empty plaza.

On the other end of the scale, I've joined almost every class that Anya has taught in her yoga studio since I've been here. We've also spent much time together as a family, enjoying simple domestic pleasures such making pelmini, a Russian kind of ravioli.

As in 2005, we drove out to nearby Lake Tourgoyak where we immersed ourselves in the pleasures of being in the beautiful countryside. There we joined other friends in a full afternoon of enjoying a true Russian banya; a sauna that includes repeating cycles of soaking up the heat, being worked over with gathered bunches of birch twigs, then taking a dip into a frigid lake.

Even though it’s only late September here, light snow flurries fell on our faces during our banya experience. The time of year also made walks through the forest colorful and breathtaking.

Time's up. On Sunday, October 5th, I'm finally going back to the States, a country in which I haven't resided for a full three years.

Chelyabinsk 2005 and 2008

Seven days in Великий двор (Velikiy Dvor)

2008-09-15T04:33:00.019-04:00

Last July at the World Hang gliding Championships in Italy, I once sat talking with people of various nations about what place in their own country they would most want to show to a visitor from another country. When it was Yulia's turn to speak, she told us of Velikiy Dvor, where her family spent the first six years of her life. There they lived in the peaceful comfort of a simple country life while Russia's difficult transition out of communism made living in Moscow too much of a challenge. Above, Yulia's mother Gulia has just returned from a wolf hunt.

When her family was able return to Moscow in the early 1990's due to the stabilization that eventually emerged, the rest of the town's small population soon followed to other major cities and Velikiy Dvor became a ghost town.

As Yulia described the area and how much she'd always longed to return there one day to see it again as an adult, I could see an inspiring gleam in her eyes. To her it was not so much a place but a state of mind.

A few days later as she and I talked of something else, I changed the subject and told her, "Remember that place you described where you grew up? I'd love to go there one day with you."
"Then let's do it," she simply said. I love it when people take me at face value.
"I'm serious," I countered, just to be sure.
"So am I," she said.

And so the wheels began to turn, both in our minds and in reality (airline tickets, visas, etc.). Initially there was talk of a group joining the adventure but, in the end, it was only she, her boyfriend Artur, and myself.

(Artur has asked that I not post any pictures of him on my blog, for reasons I didn't understand but of course did not question. The only images of him shown here and in the slide show below are ones where he is far enough away to be indistinguishable.)

I arrived in Moscow on September 5th and, after a bit of visiting, Moscow touring, and most importantly shopping to pick up a backpack and other assorted camping gear for myself, we were ready.

Monday evening, September 8th, we took an over night train to Вологда (Vologda). Arriving bleary-eyed at dawn, we spent most of that day on a bus heading further north to the nearest paved road that passed close to Мирный (Mirniy). There we hiked a few kilometers down a dirt road into the small group of houses where Yulia hoped that any member of a particular family there that her mother had once known might recognize her and assist us with covering the remaining 50 kilometers. We were prepared to cover that entire distance on foot but the friends were found, they remembered Yulia and her family, and we were given a ride further down the rough dirt road, something that took two hours in itself.

We were dropped off at a wooden bridge being rebuilt but lacking the last few truckloads of fill-dirt at the far side. After crossing it on foot, hopping down the the ground, and taking a short walk of a few hundred meters, we were there at Великий двор (Velikiy Dvor).

Though part of the house's foundation had settled and dropped the back half of the log cabin structure a few feet, Yulia's childhood home was mostly intact. This was not true for many of the other home in the town of perhaps 15 houses. Many had roofs that had completely collapsed. Some had walls that had fallen down.

Inside Yulia's home we were delighted to find a picture of her as an infant still up on a wall.

We spent some time cleaning up bird droppings, dust, and other debris, chopping wood for the night, and preparing for our first night in our home for the next week.

The next morning, our first full day there, we set out to try our hand at fishing on the river. A complete day's effort was met with little success.

The second day we hiked five kilometers to a nearby town on the edge of the lake feeding the river passing by Velikiy Dvor, hoping to find a boat we could borrow or rent. It was there that we encountered one of the trip's greatest blessings: Alec.

We had asked whomever we'd encountered (perhaps three people) if we could rent a boat to take out onto the lake. An old man offered us his rowboat free of charge, but cautioned that it would be difficult to row into the lake against the wind. After struggling with it a few hours, we reluctantly agreed and let the rowboat drift back to the shore. There we encountered fisherman returning from the lake on small boats with outboard motors and asked our questions again. We were directed to Alec's cottage and, when queried, he said he'd be happy to take us out himself tomorrow if we could return in the morning at around 11:00. The size of his boat, however, allowed only two people to join him.

His cottage had a row of freshly shot ducks hanging on one side and Yulia asked if we could buy one. "No, but you can have one,"Alec answered and handed her one, much to Yulia' delight. We would have fresh meat that night to go with the mushrooms we'd picked during the hike there.

The next morning, at Yulia's insistence, Artur and I left her and hiked back to Alec's town. After a few tries in Alec's boat as well as those of his friends, we discovered none of the boats could carry three full grown men, so Artur was left behind to fish from the shore while Alec took me off onto a wonderful, marvelous adventure of both the Russian wilderness and human kindness.

It was only after a few minutes into our journey to the part of the lake Alec wanted to show me that I discovered he spoke a little bit of English. He'd stop the motor now and then to describe various things about what we were passing, stopping onshore at one point to visit a small fishing hut that, to his gentle disgust, had been left less than clean by the previous user.

He loaned me his best fishing reel (the one I'd bought in Moscow, he gently explained, was not very good) and we fished from opposite sides of the boat. I caught one fish (two kilos: huge by my standards but average to small for the lake, I was told) and after a bit, we felt it was time to get back to Artur. As we neared the shore, he slowed the boat down to walking speed and said, "I get duck for you." In just a few minutes he shot two on the wing at unbelievably long distances.

Back at the shore he brought Artur and I into his cottage to join him for mushrooms, sausages, bread and, of course, many shots of vodka. After another hour and perhaps seven shots each (both Artur and I lost count) we felt we should return to Yulia, who'd spent the day scrubbing her home and cutting grass around it with a scythe we'd found.

Artur and I were happy, then to return to Yulia with plenty of meat to add to our stores of food to consume over the next few days.

Yulia, Artur and I went back to join Alec and his two hunting companions the next day, using all three available boats to carry the six of us out into the same area of the lake I'd been the day before. We only caught one fish between all six of us (though two got away) but Alec had caught a huge one (perhaps six kilos) two days before and so we had a huge feast anyway, deep frying filets in a wok-like device over an open fire.

As it began to grow dark, Alec and his friends used their boats to give us a ride down the river under the colorful sky, skimming on the water back to the bridge next to Yulia's home. Our hosts insisted that we three take the lone catch of the day for ourselves. With too much vodka in us again, we did not think clearly enough to get any contact details with Alec, who lives in Moscow and was only there at his dacha for another day. Before this could be rectified, all three were gone.

I so wish I had the chance to see Alec again and take him to dinner in Moscow. In all my travels these last few years, it never ceases to amaze me how good people can be all around the globe. Alec is the perfect example.

Below is a three minute collection of footage from my first afternoon with Alec amidst his kind generosity and hospitality.

Artur, Yulia and I spent our remaining days in Velikiy Dvor living simply, picking wild fruit (the forest floor was covered in blueberries and a cranberry-like fruit that was naturally sweet), cutting up scrap wood for our fires, and enjoying the natural beauty all around us.

Sunday morning, by prior arrangement, we were picked up by the same friends who'd driven us to the bridge near Yulia's home and were dropped off back at the paved road. There we caught the bus returning to Vologda and continued on with reversing the 24 hour process that had brought us to Velikiy Dvor. The last leg was, again, a Russian sleeping train which, to me, was almost as much of an exciting adventure as anything else. After dawn, I sat transfixed at the window, fascinated with simply watching the small details of Russian life pass by as we closed in on Moscow.

Below is a slideshow of the trip.

Next up: Visiting both old and new friends in Chelyabinsk, Russia.

A Short Pause in London

2008-08-29T11:21:00.004-04:00

I'm here between adventures, preparing for my last one (upcoming) before I return to the States. More on that later.

For now, I'm just enjoying where I am. I do love this city, London. It's probably the only city in the world I've visited where I think I could be happy actually living in the city itself. Below was a part of my experience two nights ago strolling along the south bank of the River Thames.

My Favorite Places on Earth

2008-08-23T10:57:00.001-04:00

After we'd flown back to the mainland and most had gone separate ways in Barcelona, Nicole and I returned by bus with German to his home just outside of Bilbao, Spain. After we arrived, we discussed what to do with our few remaining hours of daylight.

I said that I had just one request. I wanted to visit the bar I'd frequented so often two years ago in Bilbao's port town, Getxo while part of Sir Robin Knox-Johnston's shore team preparing his boat for his solo round the world race.

Once we arrived and I sat sipping my beer at El Patron (The Skipper), I was overcome with the sense that this was one of my favorite places on earth. It was here that my adventure with Sir Robin blossomed into such a collection of new friends. Not twenty feet from where I sat that evening was the table where I met German, Rafa, and Saioa, who I have come to value so much and through whom I've gained a whole new world of friends and experiences in Spain (and elsewhere).

It was here that I'd slump into a chair with a beer at the end of each day in October of 2006, exhausted but glowing with supreme satisfaction in my soul from the combination of productive hard work and a sense of being an enviable part of something grand.

I've already commited to support another remarkable human being in the next edition of the Velux 5 Oceans in 2010.

When I'd first met German at that bar in 2006, he'd asked me what else I'd seen of the region in the two weeks we'd been docked in Getxo. "This bar is as far as I've got," I told him. "We don't have the time or energy to venture any further."

Sipping my beer again in Getxo today, long removed from Sir Robin's voyage around the world and my own that followed, it was clear to me that the joy of a location isn't really about the location itself but what's associated with it. Getxo and the region of Northern Spain is beautiful, no doubt, but all my strongest joys seemed to end up coming from the people and the experiences we share, such as those I've found in the Spanish port of Getxo.

The Balearic Islands

2008-08-22T10:56:00.001-04:00

Last year's week of sailing around with Croatia with German (at the wheel here last week) and others was so enjoyable that Jamie and German started planning another trip while I was away at sea. I was the host of last year's adventure. This time around, German was the host and the location was the Balearic Islands.

I had a lot of empathy for him, knowing the weight of responsibility I felt I needed to bear last year for not only everyone's enjoyment, but their safety as well.

We had nine people on a boat designed for seven. No matter. German and I slept on the deck each night.

Clockwise around the table starting with me: Jamie, Mike, Nicole, Ander, Odei, Narea (partially obscured), Donna, and German. The tenth, Cristina, lives in Palma and joined us only on land at the beginning and end of our week.

We visited the coasts of both Mallorca and Menorca, employing a night sail to cross the channel between the two islands.

I'm extremely grateful to German for undertaking the organization of this trip. Next year's is already in the planning, only this time it will be Jamie's turn to work out all the details. German and I, the only sailors, will just be laborers...quite happily.

Laragne, France

2008-08-09T17:34:00.003-04:00

I've spent this last week in the south of France...

...with Dutch friends Daphne and Koos...

...supporting them as they compete in yet another hang gliding competition.

When not flying, we enjoy the simple pleasures of the region...

...and the goodness of each other.

They've just left the camp this evening to begin the journey back home to the Netherlands. Tomorrow I'm off to Barcelona to meet up with Jamie, German, and others for our week of sailing among the Balearic Islands off the Mediterranean coast of eastern Spain.

Italy Wrap Up

2008-08-03T17:00:00.006-04:00

An enchanting land...

...full of hidden beauty.

Furthermore, two people dear to my heart achieved their dreams: Corinna her 4th World Championship (Women, Flexwing); Alex his 2nd (Men, Rigidwing).

An explanation of just what the difference is between a flex and a rigid wing, as well as the compilation of all the video I shot, will have to wait until October, when I plan to be back in the States and have the time to write the tale.

For now, I'll leave it with just these photos of my friends' moments of triumph, as well as a 42 second video of Alex discussing his coming in 20 minutes behind that day's winner; Christian (Alex's good friend and neighbor in Italy, also two time (2002, 2004) world hang gliding champion in the rigid wing class).

Circle of Friends

2008-07-29T00:42:00.010-04:00

The entire collection of pilots here spent 10:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. Sunday waiting on the hill for the appropriate weather to fly a task. It never came. The wind was too high to safely launch or to give a significant amount of the pilots a reasonable chance of completing the task.

Though the unsuitable winds and conditions had been anticipated in the weather forecasts for days, the race committee was reluctant to waste a possible competition day. And so everyone waited until it was too late in the day to begin.

On the women's division side of the hill, an impromptu international friendship day ensued. The sense of intense and yet (for the most part) completely amicable competition is one of the aspects of these competitions that brings me to volunteer to work at them time and time again.

I found 3-time and current world champion Corinna among the Japanese. Though Corinna is fluent in four European languages, she's leaning Japanese and delights in using what bit of fluency she's gained in making the shy and reserved Japanese team feel welcome.

Though English is spoken most of all, I always delight in walking around the pre-launch preparations, listening to the sound of so many different languages, many of them spoken by a non-native: Italians speaking German and French, Argentines speaking Italian, Dutch speaking almost anything at all, and the Americans doubted if they speak English at all.

In the photo above, left to right: Russian Natalia, American Jamie, the other Russian Natalia, German Regina, English Kathleen, Swedish Birgit, German Corinna, French Francoise, and Dutch Hadewych.

The Russians have five women here, including new comers 24 year old Zhenya (l.) and 21 year old Yulia (r.).

Yulia is exceptionally comfortable in English and therefore enjoys a particularly close friendship with seemingly everyone. Bright, energetic, playful and spirited, she is everyone's delight.

All the Russians are kindly amused with my efforts to speak Russian. I've been trying to add two new Russian words each day to a notebook I carry with me. They're happy to help while they giggle and laugh beside me, though always with patience and support.

A few days ago I used the internet to translate what I thought was "I'll see you down below," a phrase I could use when they take off. When I showed them the phrase written out in my version of a hand-written Cyrillic alphabet and told them what I thought it was saying, one of the Natalias smiled with amusement and said, "Tee-mo-thee, you have written,'You go up, I go down.'"

Close enough for now.

Keeping up with me until September

2008-07-24T02:50:00.012-04:00

I'm not sure I'll be posting much here until I'm reunited with my own laptop sometime towards the end of September. It's being shipped to the USA along with my two bikes and other various items I gathered in my years in England.

I don't have any photo editing ability on this ASUS Eee PC laptop that I bought for $300 to use while I'm while puttering around Europe. It has a Linux operating system, not Windows. Finally getting around to learning Linux (something I've always wanted to do) is one reason I bought this PC. I'm still learning the ins and outs of it so working out the kinks in downloading and installing a Linux-based photo editor might take a while.

Being such a visually oriented person, I can't even begin to imagine trying to tell any tale without photos, and putting them on this blog requires perusing the multitude of hi resolution I take each day, selecting and cropping a few, then reducing them to a lower resolution image suitable for a website.

At the moment, I don't have the software on this pint-sized "subnotebook PC to do that. The photo above was usable only because I shot it just now in a low resolution mode on my camera, something I wouldn't want to do with with all the other images I capture during the day.

Jamie, however, is religious about updating her blog. Since we're traveling together and doing essentially the same thing from now until all the way to August 25th or so, you can look on her blog to see what I'm doing. Since the World Championships began a few days ago, she's been so busy during the day getting ready to compete that she uses many of the photos I've taken for myself to flesh out her blog (particularly ones of her).

You might even get a glimpse of now and then (such as my elbow on the left here from this blog entry).

Italy: First Glimpse

2008-07-21T06:52:00.000-04:00

Practice day here on Monte Cucco, above the small village of Sigillo.

What's Next?

2008-07-20T07:00:00.003-04:00

World Hang Gliding Championships in Sigillo, Italy until August 2nd, supporting Corinna (video here) and Jamie as Corinna defends her World Champion title and Jamie competes as well.

Sailing among the Balearic Islands off the Mediterranean coast of Spain in mid August with German, Jamie, and others.

Heading back to the States in September?