Judith's blog

We woke up to sunshine! The daily mist cycle in Ager was finally broken… by strong winds. The forecast said NW winds, but with strong sunshine it can come on, so we had breakfast and then headed up the hill. The N wind was much lighter than we anticipated, but it was really cold, so we sat in the car a while and then headed to the lower launch, where it was more on, but with the N wind still clearly in evidence, we didn’t think it was safe to fly. Hunger drove us back down to camping, where we played meccano, putting Nicky’s new tilting bike rack together. By 3pm we figured that if it wasn’t on now, it never would be, so we drove back up the hill, but it was still N. We checked out the N launch over the back of the hill, but it was too strong for comfort, so we gave up and said our goodbyes to Nicky and headed off home via a bit of sightseeing.

Although I have driven through Balaguer many, many times, I have never stopped to see the old town walls. Geoff has and said it was worth it. I don’t think much of the new town with endless apartment blocks, but the main square is lovely. From there we walked up the hill and to the entrance of the stepped walkway along the town walls, but it was locked. Fairly typically for round here, all the things tourists (or locals) might want to see are closed when people are actually free to see them. So you can’t see any thing during siesta times and the walls close at 2pm on a Sunday in winter. Arrgghh! We did wander around trying to find a nice place for a picnic and noticed one of the gates onto the walls hadn’t been locked, so we sneaked in for a short walk round.

Next stop Montfalco Murallat, a little medieval walled village that we haven’t been to for many years. Like Weston-super-Mare, it’s still not quite finished.

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I wasn’t too hung over after the party either! Time to say good-bye, only to meet loads of people back at the train station. I got there early, followed shortly after by Kirsty, Pat, Alex and Dave B. Kirsty was getting concerned that we wouldn’t all fit in, especially when Sarah, Barbara, Chris, Ruth and Mick turned up too with all their bags. The train is a single carriage, narrow gauge train with no space for luggage. Most people on it seem to be train enthusiasts who book their outings in advance.

On the way up, Steve Newcombe had been charged an extra fare for the seat for his paraglider, so we were prepared for hassle. The conductor nearly had a nervous breakdown when he pulled into St Andre station and saw all our bags and he started gesticulating wildly and talking in rapid-fire French. I think our determination to get on the train was evident, because he stood aside but told us no way we could leave any luggage in the aisles. We managed to pile everything between two rows of seats with Alex and Dave holding it in place and the people sitting either side glancing over their shoulders nervously every time we approached a bend. We had to stand or sit at the drivers knees for the first hour, but as the train got closer to Nice we all found seats. I would have loved to have taken photos of the stunning scenery, but my rucksack was stashed under a load of others bags and was inaccessible.

At Nice, Chris assured us that the airport bus was only down the road and then one block away, so we walked. He somewhat mis-sold us the trip. A sweaty 15 minutes later our funny looking group arrived at the main station – you need to appreciate that Alex, for example, was carrying two paragliders and looked like a Sherpa.

We ended up at the wrong terminal and then lost the marshalling team, so never got to say goodbye and thanks. Once we had checked in and got to the waiting area we were reunited with housemates David, Bren and Richard, so it was another round of good-byes. I’m not one to say no to hugs!

Back in Brum it was nice to see Geoff, but it was cold, dark and windy. We stopped off in a pub on the way home for dinner and to my utter amazement, they had their Christmas decorations up and all the staff were wearing shirts advertising their Christmas booking offers. Seems summer is really over.

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I decided to have the day off today, and get away from the crowds. I have been surrounded by people for two weeks and fancied a bit of solitude. After a lie in I did some work and then the went for a leisurely lunch on my own and was snoozing at the river when the race leaders came in. It was a nail biting race between Luc Armant and Neil Roberts, and Neil won. I was going to go for an evening flight, but ended up just driving for Emma and Mark Begg, who is here on holiday.

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It was far too windy from the outset to consider flying, so the organisation gave us the day off. We went to a Via Ferrata about 40 minutes away. Ten of us went and after a short walk in we climbed a number of sheer vertical faces. We did three traverses. The first was a himalayan bridge, the second an monkey bridge and the third a hundred meter zip slide. The pictures say it all, really.

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I’ve arrived in Ager for the first of two comps, back to back. I am a little apprehensive about doing one comp after the other, because at the moment it looks very, very flyable, so it’ll be full on for two weeks with little prospect of a day off. I’ve been a little nervous about these two particular comps, since both are in places renowned for big air. On the other hand, I don’t really know why I am particularly nervous. I know Ager well, having flown there a fair bit and having learnt to paraglide here. I have a nice safe wing and I can always land if I don’t like the conditions, since I am a clear also-ran, rather a serious competitor. The other nice thing is that with 35-odd competitors, the women’s comp isn’t going to be crowded, so it won’t be too busy in the gaggles.

My priority of these next few weeks is fun. I’m going to enjoy the holidays, hang out with the girls (and guys next week) and do some good flying too, I hope.

Geoff dropped me off this morning, bitterly regretting that he’s not coming with me when the forecast is so bad. In the seats on the plane next to me were some lovely young Welsh lads on a stag do. They had dressed the groom in a polyester matador outfit, which was going to be a) far too hot; b) somewhat tasteless given the amount of people injured in the bull rampage of yesterday; and worst of all c) incur the wrath of every Catalan who will think he is making a Spanish nationalist statement against the Catalan bullfighting ban. Let’s hope he gets gored by a passing bull before the Catalans get him.

We had some fun and games getting all our party assembled at the airport, with us all arriving at different times. Catherine from Switzerland had arrived at 8am. Kirsty and Ruth were already there, and I was supposed to be last and phoning for the retrieve at 1.30pm. We were short of Domenica and found her two and a half hours later in the other terminal, where it had taken her three hours to get back her paraglider her airline had lost the day before. Joanna arrived at 4pm from Venezuela via Frankfurt, having been upgraded to business class and then waited on hand and foot by Corinna Swiegerhausen (the German national HG champion), who works as cabin crew on Lufthansa.

We got to Ager some hours later and first things first… a cold beer and meeting up with Emma. Lots of people were flying and it would have been nice to go up, but we had to sort out the apartment (we didn’t get the one we booked in March), and were too hungry. So nice to see so many friends. Mike Cluer is here, as well as many women not seen in ages. Really nice to have big dinner with so many smiling girls.

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We’d camped at the Riverside Camping near Blaenau Ffestiniog, ready for a visit to the Llechwedd Slate Caverns. We’ve been to coal mines, salt mines and other caves, but the slate mine was something completely different. The mountain has been hollowed out into 15 levels of massive chambers, mostly 80 feet high, which were carved out by by candle light, using hand tools and gun powder. The mine goes down 1500 feet below ground and you can go down to level 7, approximately 480′ below the summit. The tours were interesting, but could have been more informative and they were geared to fast throughput of visitors, so you didn’t get much of a chance to ask questions. Still a fascinating place though.

Blaenau Ffestiniog is dominated by the slate mining, which is now done open cast and all the surrounding hills are covered with slate debris, giving the town a fairly unique look. There’s not much to do and see around the town and although we hoped to do some walks round the slate quarries, the weather, which had been very co-operative so far, turned worse. The rain started to fall in earnest, and I’m not a big fan of walking in the rain. We thought the weather might be better on the south side of Snowdonia and headed for Dollgelau, but it was equally drizzly there, so we headed home.

My parents called in on their way to Ireland in the evening, so we had a nice catch-up over the dinner of cheese and wine they kindly brought from France.

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We woke up and drove along the north side of the Llyn peninsula in search of breakfast. I’ve learnt various things about Wales this holiday:

1) The camping to cafe ratio on the northern part of the Llyn peninsula is completely crazy (millions of campsites, two cafes).

2) The Welsh aren’t big on pavements or parking.

We couldn’t eat in Aberdaron, because there was nowhere to park and it took us all the way to Caernarfon to find somewhere to eat. At Caernarfon, we went to see the castle, which is massive. We were there for a full 3 hours and still didn’t get round all the towers, passageways and nooks and crannies, so we were surprised to see the people who paid in the queue ahead of us leaving after just 17 minutes. A record of some sort, surely. Maybe for the shortest attention span ever.

The other thing I learnt is that the British seem to have become a nation of moaners. Each place we went to people were moaning about this, that and the other. There were even young apprentice moaners under the age of twelve. When in Rome and all that, I found myself starting to moan about stuff as well, but mostly my whinging was about all the moaners around me.

We love castles and got a tour, then read the whole exhibition and then watched the audio visual display, and would have bought the guidebook to look round more if we hadn’t been so hungry and thirsty. After a walk round the town we settled to a picnic in the main square which has a brilliant fountain. It has 24 jets which are controlled by a computer programme set to random patterns, so it changes all the time. There are gaps in the jets and loads of children were running past and through it, gambling on the programme not changing and them staying dry. Excellent fun.

We had to decide what to do next and I’ve always wanted to go to Anglesey. Geoff has dissuaded me before, telling me how flat and boring it is. I wanted to get an independent view, so we went to the Caernarfon tourist information. The bloke there described it as “flat and full of weirdos”, so we went on a boat trip on the Menai Strait instead.

We spent the evening driving through Snowdonia national park and stopped at Beddgelert. Lovely village, stunning river, limited parking.

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