Florida ‘08 - 5

After the flight, we headed south… to the southernmost point of the continental US: Key West. The trip from Miami takes around four hours, but is really worth it. More than half of the time, you can look at the sea on both sides of the road, and the longest bridge is over seven miles long.

This is a really great place for holidays, it was like always +35C , and the ocean was around +30C… not that bad for swimming ! Night life is very developed too, with lots of places playing live music and tons of bars (even if you avoid the gay ones).

Florida ‘08 - 4

In the air… but not the usual one ! Before coming to Florida, I got in touch with a local school, which directed me to an experimented CFI, Carlo. With him, I’ve been able to fly a bit there on a Cessna 172. That was a great experience, especially when we were over the Everglades,  thinking about what would happen if our only one engine would fail… pretty sure alligators like the taste of pilots

Here are some pictures from our flight :

Florida ‘08 - 3

Lots of pictures today ! I’m done with picking the good ones out of the hundreds I still had…

Let’s start with a few from West Palm beach :

Florida ‘08 - 2

New batch of pictures, mostly from Miami Beach. Wonderful place, by the way: white sand, palm trees everywhere, and Art Déco hotels…

Next time, pictures will be from somewhere else in Florida.

Florida ‘08 - 1

Just a short post to share some pictures of my Florida trip. More will come in the next days, and I’ll write my impressions ASAP.

Greece 2008

It might be the last long summer holiday for me (done with college, going to a special school… with special holidays), so I’m trying to get the most out of it. Of course, that means going to the beach, seeing friends… but this time I’m doing in far away from home: in Greece !

I’ve spent a week there, between Athens, Aegina and Andros. It’s quite impressive when you left Paris with a +16C temperature to walk out of the plane and feel the 20C difference there is, plus instead of the rain showers, you don’t even bother to watch the forecasts… the sky is blue. Always blue. No clouds, CAVOK as we call that !

Staying in Athens for two days on arrival seemed to be a good idea, it’s quite enough to visit a bit, and you can’t stand the heat anymore than that. There are plenty of things to do in that city, of course starting with the Acropolis. OK, that’s where every tourist goes, but it’s really a must-do. The monuments are impressive, and even more when you remember they’re more than 2000yrs old. But it’s also the best place to get a clean view of the capital, and all the neighborhood is nice and very typical of Greece (Plaka, Agora…). Hopefully, they have good beaches near Athens, and you can’t imagine speding a day without going to one.

After that short stay, I left for the islands, starting with Aegina. this one is very close to the Piraeus harbor, and it only takes one hour of ferry boat to go. This is the Pistachio
island, and they really grow those trees everywhere. Once you left the mainland, things change a lot ! No more stress, you see the sea everywhere, they’re no crowd…

The other island I’ve been to was Andros, in the Cyclades archipelago. To make it short, the Cyclades are what the wallpapers of Greece are made of: dark blue sea, clear sky and all white houses. And to be honest, the cliché is not far from reality, the latter often being even nicer ! It takes a little more than two hours to go there by ferry, once there I rented a scooter, and here we go ! In Greece, driving is one of the most frightening experiences you can live: nobody follows any regulation, people don’t stop at stop signs or at red lights, priority is to the one with the strongest horn, and of course, you don’t wear a helmet to drive a motorbike ! But that’s so different from our ultra-repressive France it turns out to be amazing ! So, I went Greek style, shorts, raybans and no helmet. Got myself a sunburn: bad idea.

On my way around the island, I’ve seen some of the best landscapes I’ve seen in Europe, it’s clearly marvelous !

As you can expect, I took a lot of pictures there, all the great ones are in my Gallery

The end of (bad) times.

Finally, summer holidays arrived… I’m now done with this college year, I’ve passed my exams and graduated last week. Besides that, interviews for next year are also over, meaning I’m on holidays. I know that sounds redundant, but I can’t get myself used to that idea thus I must repeat it.

Let’s celebrate that, and before champagne, a little flight would be great…

Yesterday, we had a lot of thunderstorms here, and I had to wait until the sky clears a bit before flying. Great idea that was… we went in the air just before the sun set. Enjoy the pics !

A weekend at the airfield

A friend of mine came from Paris for a short vacation, he’s a pilot too, thus making the planning easy to write… flying-watching planes-talking planes-flying-wat[…] Good news was learning there was some kind of a meeting on our usual airfield during this precise weekend, so we had new aircrafts to look at, and crews to talk with.

We’ve been in the air together from friday to monday, for various flights going from a simple airport pattern practice to our first international flight (more to come about this), and as always, I brought my camera… the whole folder is about 10GB, I definitely gotta be treated for that photographic-Parkinson syndrome

First flight: (full gallery here)

Then, on the two next days, we took advantage of the weather to go chasing the clouds (don’t misunderstand me here, we complied with the visual flight rules every time, that means staying out of that nice lil’ cumulus), enjoy the view :

After those great flight experiences, we decided to go a bit farther, that’ll be detailed in the next post…

Twilight

The Sun sets on the Ocean, we’re on the opposite side watching the nearly empty Bassin d’Arcachon changing colors every minute… Eating pizzas on the beach while looking at this, how can a week end start in a better way ?

More pics

Time doesn’t count there.

It has been a special weekend here, lasting from Thursday to Sunday, and fortunately the Sun was not on vacation somewhere else ! Just like the every day growing crowd of visitors, we drove to the Cap Ferret, our local attraction. In fact, it’s just a little village located at the tip of a peninsula, where the Bassin d’Arcachon opens up onto the Atlantic Ocean, but it’s rather nicely organized to attract tourists, with beaches on both sides, and a pleasant town to wander in.

That’s my favorite place to relax, it’s only twenty minutes away, but far, far away from any source of stress. There’s absolutely nothing serious to do, just have fun at the beach, go for a walk in streets where there are no cars, enjoy the calm while eating a banana split…

Some other pictures are in the Gallery