Judith's blog

What a miserable day. At the beginning of the week today was supposed to be the best day of the week. We woke up to pouring rain, but got to spend the morning with my parents who are en-route to the airport so my mum can help out with the birth of my new niece/nephew who is due by caesarean tomorrow morning, unless s/he decides to turn upside down.

The rest of the day we worked, finishing off all the conference documentation for the US Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf and then having an LMSC committee meeting this evening.

No comments yet - please add one »

We’ve got a lot on this week, with work, socialising, skiing and flying. Trying to make the most of it is turning into a logistical challenge! We decided to go skiing once this week but needed to pick the day. We’re hoping to go flying with Nicky tomorrow and Friday’s forecast looks uncertain… needless to say, we went into dither mode. In the end what clinched it was the forecast for here. Grey skies towards the coast, blue in the mountains.

We’d forgotten that it’s Semana Blanca (white week), where the kids take a week off from school to do activities – these can be anything, skiing, archery, arts and crafts, whatever their school organises. The ski resorts always get busy at these times, and we were horrified to find we actually had to queue for a lift! Normally during the week we feel we have the place to ourselves, so it’s always a bit of a shock to the system when others turn up.

Anyway, they churned up the snow and made it less pleasant, so we packed up half-way through the day. After a nice cold beer in the sunny car park, we drove off and were almost immediately under the grey claggy sky. It got worse and worse as we drove closer to home. Really pleased we made the decision to head north and make the most of the good weather. Especially since I’ve just seen the updated forecast for tomorrow. Really crap!

See photos of today.

No comments yet - please add one »

The forecast for today was slightly worse than yesterday. Strong north at the coast, low pressure and probably more cloudy. We dismissed going skiing, deciding to save it for a sunnier day tomorrow. I have loads of work to catch up on, so knuckled down this morning, but it didn’t seem too windy and there were nice cumulus forming, so at 2pm we decided to give Santa Brigida a go. The plan was that if it was flyable we’d have a quick sandwich and then fly, if not, we could sit in the sun, have a sandwich and a beer, read for an hour and then head home via a look around Les Preses. Since all the local mid-week flyers have abandoned us, we assumed we’d be the only ones there.

As we got closer, we were looking at the usual tell-tales for wind and were getting a little concerned, until we saw a glider over the ridge. Geoff put his foot down…

We could see three gliders getting reasonable height, but didn’t look high enough, another four were on their way to cloudbase. As we got up to launch our assumption was confirmed – a group of French pilots in FFVL vans. There were a dozen or so pilots altogether. We thought it was probably the school in Font Romeu, where they teach paragliding as an elective, but the R10s and high aspect Sky gliders seemed a bit advanced even for the amazing child pilots the school produces. As we walked on to launch, the wind was west, sometimes even north and the guys were launching when the thermals brought it on. They were getting high, but from their glide it was clear that the wind was actually 90 degrees off and when it turned, they were having some minor problems, although the guys who had launched earlier were in orbit.

I got ready and decided to wait a bit. The forecast was northerly and this wasn’t a classic Santa Brigida forecast. The smoke in the valley was north and on the monastery flag it was west. If we’d been on our own, we would not have got the gliders out of the bag. Everything inside my head was screaming ‘Don’t do this! if you have an accident and you have to explain it, it will be bloody obvious you shouldn’t have launched!’  But seeing people high, having a great time is a massive draw. Geoff let some more visitors go and then decided to launch too. I know his flying style better than anyone else’s and can get more info about the conditions from watching him than any other indication. He didn’t seem to make it look horrible at all. I waited a little longer and then the wind turned south … not just on launch, but in the valley in front and behind as well. Time to go!

I launched straight into a thermal and got up to 1200′ ATO easily and cruised around. I wasn’t thermalling very well. It’s been a while since we’ve been in strong, drifting thermals and I was having some issues mapping them. It didn’t really matter, since there was lift everywhere and every cloud was working really well. Since I didn’t launch until nearly 4pm, I assumed that the conditions would deteriorate and therefore didn’t try too hard, and that might have been a mistake, since the French guys did pretty big triangles, some getting to near Roca Corba, Puig d’Afrou and back. People were basically flying all over the place. After an hour and a quarter in the air, I attempted a couple of top landings, but it had picked up a lot and it was impossible to get down. Geoff was already trying to bottom land and I could see he was having a bit of a time of it, so decided to do the sensible thing and go down too – if it meant a walk back up, so what?

A few of us came in at the same time, so I elected to go into the higher field, but as I came in I hit a huge wind gradient and got dumped on my butt very unceremoneously. It turned out that the French guys weren’t from the Font Romeu area, but from the Alps and some are in the national team. They’re based in Berga for the week, but since it’s too windy in Berga they came down to Santa Brigida. A Sky glider came in after me and it was Laurie Genovese – star of the Women’s Open in Àger last August. Really lovely to see her.

And the conditions today? Base was 2700m (8860′) AMSL – that’s 2260m (7400′) ATO!

Geoff writes: as often happens at Santa Brigida, you’re flying a southerly site in strong northerly winds, and that always makes us a bit wary. But the reality was that today, though the wind was very switchy, there was not that much met wind (at first), so it seemed safe to treat this as a normal thermic site and launch when the cycles came on, as they increasingly did. It was very thermic, but not too rough, and easy to get high. At about 3400′ ATO, though, it did get rough, and I’m pretty sure this was the shear layer between the south and north winds. The clouds were drifting from the north, quite fast, i.e. the met wind higher up was north. I was a bit reluctant to go through this, and so pulled out at about 3500′ ATO. The other consideration at Santa Brigida is the airspace, and it is important to avoid that, for obvious reasons. The visiting pilots were not aware of the airspace, not having checked it out before they came.

So I pulled out and pushed forward, getting further over the ridge in front than I have ever done before. There were thermals everywhere, and it was very easy to stay up – but harder to get down. When I decided to land, the met wind low down had picked up a fair bit, and top landing was very hard, so I decided to bottom land. Not sure if this was a good decision, because it was rough landing, but I got down fine.

And just one Catalan pilot there! All the rest were French, and us.

All in all, a pretty epic day – quite possibly the best we have ever had there.

See photos of today.

No comments yet - please add one »

Geoff writes: a morning of working, then we went out to fly. All the indicators we normally use were giving SE around Santa Brigida, but when we got there it actually had a lot of north  in it. We waited around for a while, but finally gave up and came back home to work. The day did get worse, with a front coming in, though when we went out at first it was a great sky.

Some people from the Midland Gliding Club are currently in Jaca, in the Pyrenees. Today, they got in wave, to FL195 – over 20,000′, and -40C!

No comments yet - please add one »

Geoff writes: last day in Athens, with a mid-afternoon flight.  Another cold and cloudy day. We spent an hour or two at the Roman forum, part of our 12 euro ticket which got us into five separate sites, including the Acropolis. It’s great value – each time you go somewhere, they rip off a section of the ticket, so you can’t use it again. We got to the forum, which was open, but the ticket office was empty, so we managed to sneak in without losing part of our ticket – the last part, in fact, so we thought we could later revisit another site (the Agora) we had had to rush around on Thursday, given the daft closing times they have here of 3pm.

The forum was good – big, reasonably well preserved, and, that early in the morning, empty. It was also freezing, so we decided to use the ticket to go back to the Agora, and the indoor museum there. We went to the ticket office to hand in our ticket, to the guy who ignored us for a while, before telling us it was free on Sundays. So much for sneaking into the forum. Still, we went in and did see all the things we missed on Thursday.

Then a wander around the flea market for an hour or two, lunch, and the bus back to the airport. We took the bus rather than the metro because we wanted to see the outskirts of the city. Predictably, like most modern cities, and most roads to airports, they were very drab and uninspiring.

We really liked Athens. The weather wasn’t disastrous, it only really rained on one day. The archaelogical sites are great, as is the city itself, which is really lively, interesting, and not threatening (at least, not in the central areas). And the people were really friendly. The only downside (apart from the weather, and that was just bad luck, it’s not normally like that) was the incredible amount of graffiti (though in terms of litter, the city was very clean in the centre); and the very early closing times of the archaelogical sites and museums. Oh, and not being able to flush toilet paper away, but having to put it in a wastepaper bin instead…

See photos of today.

No comments yet - please add one »

Today was a cold, grey windy day. But mostly it was cold. I didn’t feel well in the night, but I was damned if it was going to ruin my holiday, so dragged myself out anyway. We decided to got to the tourist information to check out buses and if anything was happening today, but despite the sign saying it should be open, it was closed – we seem to have that kind of effect on tourist information offices. So first destination today was the cemetery. It’s a bit left field for a tourist site, but apparently, it’s like a sculpture park.

Unfortunately we didn’t get there, as we got distracted by the stadium. You can see into it, but have to pay to go round it, and it’s just a modern oblong amphitheatre, so it seemed a bit pointless handing over the readies. By this time we were too far from the cemetery, so we walked towards Lycabettus Hill. I’ve been looking forward to taking the cable car/funicular railway (depending on which translation you read) up the hill since we got here.  The closer we got the worse I felt. I wasn’t up to map reading and Geoff found us to roughly where the map said the funicular was, but we could only find a path up, nothing else. We started the walk up, but I had to stop a few times with pain and then vomiting. What we didn’t ever find was any evidence of a funicular. Anywhere. We assumed they must have dismantled it until we read it was actually underground, in a channel under the surface of the hill. If there are no views it seems pointless, especially if the walk up is pretty easy anyway!

It was freezing on top, so we just carried on down the other side and then walked through the districts of Neopolis and Exarchia. The latter is the anarchist/bohemian quarter and we wandered around looking at shops and the amazing graffiti on the walls. Athens has little litter, but a lot of graffiti, most of it just pure vandalism, but in Exarchia there are some real artists at work. We ended our stroll at Omonia Square, where our original hotel was. It is dodgy and we’re so glad we changed hotels.

By the time we were back in our area I was frozen and although feeling much better, I wanted to have a snooze, so we went back to the hotel. We set  off out at 6pm to have more of a walk and find dinner. On our first night here we ate in the square just a couple of hundred meters from our hotel in the centre of Plaka, but were royally ripped off. The tout that persuaded us to go in promised us free drinks and dessert, but the food was atrocious and they charged us for water we didn’t order (same price as wine), bread, service charge, etc. Touts are in front of pretty much every restaurant and they get very wearing.  We were determined to find somewhere more off the beaten track to eat and started walking down the main shopping road towards Monastiraki district. At the bottom of the street there was a group of young people with signs (in Greek and English) saying ‘Free Hugs’. They waved them at us, but in true British fashion, we just walked by and then stopped to check out what was happening. I assumed they were some sort of religious nutters, but they didn’t actually engage people in chat, they literally just hugged anyone who felt like it. One of the guys came over to us, so we asked him why they were doing this. He looked at me in a puzzled way and said: “Because we like hugging!” So Geoff and I both got a lovely big hug from a lovely young man. We walked away smiling, thinking what a wonderful way it was to bring some random happiness to people.

We wandered around the closing flea market again and tried to find a tout free restaurant, when we came across our hugging friends for a second time. After a quick hug we asked them where to eat and got some excellent tips, so we thanked everyone with a big hug. What nice people the Greeks are!

The restaurant was a proper local place – just what we wanted on our last evening. And then off to a bar (again, no touts), which offered cheap beer. But the amazing thing was that they had a covered roof terrace with views of both the Acropolis and the Temple of Hephaestus, so you could sit in the warm with these amazing vistas. It was really cool. We were the only ones in there until eight lads from Imperial College CivSoc turned up. We were hoping this meant Civil Society, but realised it was civil engineering and once they were on their second round, we headed off. Interesting day and lovely evening…

See photos of today.

1 Comment »

We’ve been struggling to find a decent forecast while here, so I decided just to go with the synoptic. Despite all the crappy wherever-you-are forecasts saying it was going to pour today, I insisted that it would be fine. Cloudy, but fine. To my immense relief, I was right.

We set the alarm for 7.30am (which is actually 6.30am real time for us) and got to the Acropolis for 8.40am. We sauntered up via the longer southerly route, past the Theatre of Dionysus. They still have some of the original seating – not just the standard stone tiers, but actual stone seats, with names on them. Once we got up to the hill, we realised what a great plan it was to go early. It wasn’t too busy and you could point at land marks without stabbing someone in the eye (unlike last time I was there in July 1988). As we walked back to the site entrance a wave of visitors came flooding towards us.

We decided to walk across to the Philopappou hill to see the momuments and the views of the Acropolis. I managed to get us successfully up the hill, but then got distracted by views and got us hopelessly lost getting down the other side. Let’s just say we went off the beaten tourist track… through hedges, over fences and up and down some very minor paths. We eventually did make it to Kerameikos, site of the ancient walls, gates and cemetery of the city. It was a really interesting place, but we would have made more of it if we hadn’t missed the introductory information in the rush to get to a sunny bench to stuff our faces with delicious spinach pastries for lunch. Once again we were turfed out of the place by 2.45pm, having not seen it all.

We ambled back towards the hotel via a sunny beer in the square, had a rest and then headed out to see the changing of the guards at the parliament. If I described the soldiers as ‘ministry of silly walks’, they were just dilettantes – this lot are the real inspiration for John Cleese. And Monty Python was actually a pale imitation of the real thing. See here for just a snap shot of the whole malarky. It is very bizarre – partly that people will join something which forces them to act like that – but also, whoever thought up the silly walks in the first place, must have been really, really strange.  

Next up was the Acropolis Museum, the only archeological thing open in the evening. It’s purpose built and really well done. The building is on an excavation site, and the floors are made of glass, so you can see the dig happening live. Most impressively, the building is a similar size to the Parthenon on the Acropolis, and they have displayed the friezes, metopes and pediments as they would have been seen in-situ. And the building is high enough to get an amazing night-time illuminated view of the Acropolis while you walk around.

And yesterday, I thought the sleeping dogs were just coincindence, but they’re everywhere. I have no idea what they get up to at night, but they seem to need more sleep than cats. Everywhere you look there’s a sleeping dog!

See photos of today.

No comments yet - please add one »