Blinkin eck, its as warm here as it was in Cannes and Cagliari!!!

We’ve arrived safely home, the vac pump while intermittently warning us of its impending failure remained serviceable throughout the flight. The aircraft has been abandoned at the hangar for the engineers to replace the pump and figure out why we were using a litre of oil every 4 hours (that is high for almost any aircraft..!)

We had a great trip, saw lots of new places and experienced some very different flying: Italian airspace and mountains were two big new things, but also the whole idea of doing a long trip. We did about 10hrs flying in the end, which is what we expected.

Linda is back to work tomorrow, a day early to recoup some leave. Apparently I’m off to Tesco. Got the pictures from the last leg of the journey to put online too, I’ll do that in the morning as my body thinks its almost midnight and I’ve been up since 7am Cannes time!

I started typing this at 3000ft over the town of Sézanne east of Paris. Linda is at the controls and we are making good progress, the weather is cloudy but not threatening.

Our first flight from Cannes to Lyon was glorious, up at 8500ft over the western side of the Massif Central. Linda flew this leg and landed very nicely at Bron, the home of Norbert Dentressengle’s Citations. Landing fee was a mere €18.

I then flew to Troyes. Compared to previous flights this was very boring – no high ground and no airspace issues. It got exciting landing at Troyes – no ATC, speak French only! Somehow we managed and got parked up outside the terminal.

The good run with the arcraft is over though. Already contending with higher than normal oil usage, we now have a dodgy vacuum pump. If it fails it’s not the end of the world, we lose a couple of instruments but we would like to keep them working ideally. We’ve spoken to te engineers who are happy for us to continue, so we shall.

We are now in Le Touquet where we’ll head into town for a late lunch. Linda will have done her flying for the day after landing at Le Touquet so I’m sure she will have a last slurp of la biere francaise.

We’ll then launch for our final leg, back to Cranfield. We should be landing at Cranners just before closing time and then it’s straight to the hangar for the aeroplane and home for us!

After returning to shore we set about finding an Internet cafe, all the while scouring the air for free wifi. Sadly the French are savvy to protecting wifi so we stuffed ourselves into a small shop with old PC’s to check the weather.

We had two ideas in mind. The weather looks promising for Thursday but more marginal for Friday and Saturday with heavy showers and possible thunderstorms over the UK and northern France.

Idea 1 was the least favourable but infinitely more sensible option of flying home all the way tomorrow. This would mean about 4 1/2 hrs in the Mooney with stops at Lyon Bron, Troyes and Le Touquet to change seats. A lot of flying but doable especially in good weather and with an autopilot. Lunch would be either in Troyes or maybe a late lunch in Le Touquet depending on how we got on.

Idea 2 was to fly as far as Paris. Linda would fly to Lyon Bron then I would squeeze the Mooney onto the 600m runway at Lognes east of Paris. From there it’s relatively easy to get a train west to Paris, and east to Disneyland. This meant finding a reasonable hotel somewhere, something we couldn’t do. It also left us flying home on Sunday and rather at the mercy of the Weather Gods. If the showers were slow to clear we’d have been, as Bender in Futurama would put it, boned.

So we’ve gone for option 1. The Mooney is pleasantly cool in flight, which surprised me, and if we’re flying we cant be walking miles coz my feet have had enough! We’ve got an 8am taxi tomorrow to fleece, sorry, TAKE us to Cannes Airport and we’ll start our trek northwest.

So the UK beckons for us again. It’s been a great trip, we’ve seen loads and experienced lots of different flying. But I’ll be glad when I hear a British ATCO again and see the white cliffs – always a welcoming sign.

Regarding photos, not got the Siena ones onward up yet due to the fact that obtaining wifi here in the hotel in Cannes involves selling body parts. I’ll upload them as soon as we get home – they’re all sorted, just need some wifi to use!!!

Turns out the hotel we booked in the little internet cafe is just outside Cannes, inland by about a mile. Still, it’s handy for the bus to town and best of all it’s free as I used the last of my Priority Club points.

After a brief mid-day siesta (something the Europeans have dead right) we walked down the hill into town.

For all the expensive yachts in the Vieux Port, Cannes is really just a seaside town – albeit an expensive one with posh shops and the like. The beaches are nice and the views inland up toward the mountains are stunning.

These mountains though had some pretty forbidding clouds brewing over them, making us glad we weren’t flying any later. We did have some rain in the evening but nothing like what fell in Siena. It did nothing to dampen the heat though.

Initially we thought to walk back to the hotel to work off dinner, but got sidetracked with a visit to the panoramc views available from the Castre. To get here we walked up narrow steep streets with restaurants on either side, all of which looked delicious. It was very steep, but the views at the top were worth it.

It was at the top we noticed the first mural, a painting of a pirate bursting out of a large house. Back at the bottom near the bus stop we saw an even better fresco, this time with lots of famous characters from film – Mickey, Minnie, R2D2, Batman and the original joker to name but a few. All were painted on the side of a building as if they were on various balconies, very effective and realistic.

Today is our full day in Cannes. We had pondered taking a boat trip into Monte Carlo but our slovenly awakening meant we missed the sailing by about an hour. Instead we took a ferry boat to Ile Sainte-Marguerite, a 15-min boat ride south of Cannes.

The Ile is home to the prison that the man in the iron mask was held captive. We’ve spent most of the day wandering the island, visiting the fort and having lunch on a rocky beach before exploring some rock pools.

I’m typing this overlooking a marina on the south of the island. It’s gorgeously warm and a sea breeze is keeping the humidity down. Soon we will venture back into town, we need to find an Internet cafe to work out what to do tomorrow – either had back to Cranfield early and beat the storms or stop somewhere like Paris and spend the weekend, returning on Sunday. We shall see.

Pictures from Cannes can now be found here!

Last night there must have been another big storm in Siena. We missed it but everywhere was soaked as we arrived. We wisely chose to skip a tour round the Piazza. The rain last night though has led to fog this morning. The visibility on the journey to the airfield was down to 500m or less with low cloud, but it was lifting as we arrived.

We climbed away from Siena northwesterly. Plans to overfly the town first were scuppered by low cloud over the town but we climbed clear of the clouds, initially towards Pisa up to 3000ft then further to 8500ft.

Problem one: Pisa wouldn’t let us overfly the airfield, even right up high. So we hastily planned a route to the east of Luca. We remained clear of clouds the whole way – there were some biggies, but they all seemed to be just off our track which was a plus.

Problem two: Milan Information. In France and the UK the “info services” are very useful. Here it was a disaster. It took me a dozen calls to even be acknowledged, the controller kept going ape at people stepping on each other. He cleared another Brit direct to La Spezia then told him he was in the La Spezia danger area. We were trying to get clearance through that danger area but gave up.

Calm was restored when we were handed to Genoa and we were quickly cleared on exactly the route we requested. We were even handed over to Nice.

This is where it went a bit wrong for me. I left the descent a bit late, then didn’t trim the aircraft right for the final. The result was a quick bounce followed by a go-around, something I’ve not done in years. Oh well, the second approach was fine.

We fuelled up on arrival in Cannes then moved the aircraft gingerly onto the grass parking. There don’t seem to be any formalities here, we were let through a gate and caught a cab to our hotel.

The pictures from this leg of the trip are here!

We’ve altered our objectives for the remainder of the trip. Two reasons really: 1) the weather over Italy looks to be getting stormy, and 2) I’m getting a bit fed up with paying a fortune for taxis everywhere.

So Lucca is off the schedule. The main aim of Lucca was to fly there on Tuesday morning, spend the day there and then take the train to Pisa on Wednesday. Many people have said there is not much to do in Pisa so rather than land, knock up another €120 in landing, parking and taxi fees we’d give it a miss. We can always Ryanair there sometime.

Instead we are going to fly direct to Cannes. This is a 90min sector, flying over Pisa, Genoa and Albenga to track the coast. We’ll spend a couple of days in Cannes and then decide where to go from there. It looks like it may be stormy in England Friday and Saturday, so we either fly home on Thursday or move on to somewhere like Troyes or Paris for the weekend and fly home on Sunday.

Flexibility is the keyword for the rest of the trip, we have booked the Holiday Inn Cannes for Tuesday night but that’s it – so we’ll see where the wind takes us!

Our original plan was to spend a couple of nights in Siena then hop north to Firenze for another couple of nights. Firenze Airport however couldn’t accomodate us unless we wanted to pay €100 a night. On top of that the email correspondent indicated “Siena was nice anyway”. Taken that as Firenze’s way of saying get lost we went to Siena.

Not wishing to miss out on Firenze we took the train. Having walked miles yesterday we didn’t really want to do another full day, but hey that’s what happened. The railway station was at least a 30min walk up and down and up and down through Siena, but our timing was good and we got our tickets with 5mins to spare and boarded the train for Firenze.

There are no turnstiles or ticket inspetors on the stations in Italy. We thought. When the inspector came round on the journey he told us we should have stamped the ticket in the yellow machines. Turns out these machines are about the size of a small shoebox and wallmounted with no explanations what so ever. Gee thanks. He let us off and then buttoned the yanks next to us €5 each for having no tickets at all.

Firenze Central railway station is in the heart of the city and many of the main sights are within a few blocks of the station. We strolled through a piazza then down to the river, where we saw the Ponte Vecchio. A normal bridge, but with the addition of houses and shops on either side of the road across.

Lunch was in a blissfully air-conditioned cafe near the Ponte Vecchio before we continued our tour, exploring the Palazzo Piiti, an Internet cafe (for weather – we’ve been unable to find any wifi in Italy so far), and then down into the old town and the Cathedrale.

They didn’t build churches by halves in the old days. This was a massive cathedral that the pictures simply do not do justice. Inside is no less impressive, and the inside of the dome is covered in a fresco of people all around. Truly amazing.

Another amazing thing, but in a very different way, is the street sellers. They peddle paintings, remote control cars and assorted crap but when the Polizia Municipale turn up they are packed away and disappear before the police can touch them. Entertaining to watch!

Nev had told us a must-see was Michaelangelo’s David. This statue is in the Museo della Accademia and we’d been warned to expect queues. No queues but that probably was because the Museum was shut. Ho hum. We had a rather tasty ice cream instead – truly an art form in Italy, the ice cream.

We enjoyed Florence very much. So much more to see and do than we had time for in the 10hrs we were there, maybe next time. As it was despite the promise to our feet that we’d go easy on them we walked for miles! After the train back to Siena we paid up for another taxi to get us back to the hotel, we couldn’t bring ourselves to do all that climbing again!

Our Firenze pictures are now available here.

Another “spirited” drive in a taxi later and we find ourselves within the Walls of Siena town, at a tiny hotel we booked online called Antica Torre. It’s nice, very small but clean. The bathroom is tiny, you have to shuffle sideways down it to get past the sink and bidet to the toilet or shower. The aircon wasn’t working either, but I plugged it in and the room chille nicely.

The hotel claims to be a short walk to Piazza del Campo, home to the famous Palio race. The Palio is the reason we can only stay in Siena for two days, it gets pretty busy.

The walled city of Siena is a labyrinth of narrow streets, many of them hilly. Cars are restricted in the Walls but Terence are still enough of them about fitting through the smallest gaps. The walk to the Piazza took about 10-15 minutes, and when we walked in we could see the preparations for the Palio were well underway. Many of the shops and restaurants now have wooden bleachers up, covering the windows and moving the tables further from the shop. Around the cobbled central piazza us a wooden wall, chained around the concrete posts that would normally stand there alone. And the biggest change to the Piazza is that the walkway all around the outside of the Piazza is now sand. Thick sand – almost 2 inches worth in places – compacted down for the horses to race on.

Sitting in the Piazza having a late afternoon drink we discovered when the sand is not necessarily a good idea. It rained. And thundered. And rained some more. People scattered into the restaurants but when we emerged the sand was the slippiest sludge you have ever walked on. It caked your feet and was a messy gloop. You could see people leaving the Piazza washing shoe in puddles – us included.

As part of the Palio everywhere is brightly decorated in diferent colours. We don’t have a guidebook here, but believe the colours are that of the different Contrada in the town, different areas. We think there are a total of 16 Contrada but may well be wrong on that. On Sunday we saw a massive troop of blue and white costumed people with drums and flags. Lots of noise heralded their arrival onto the Piazza spilling out of the narrowest alley, before heading through another exit. We encountered a red and yellow troop in another part of the town, similarly noisy.

We spent hours roaming up and down the narrow streets, climing and descending and dodging madmen on scooters. We explored an old basilica and went to Il Duomi, an old cathedral which looks to be under restoration. The map we had was vague at best, and numerous times we ended up back at the Piazza for a bearing check.

Pictures are online here.

The worst loss of direction came in the dark to head back to the hotel. Foolishly I left the map on the table at the restaurant, and by the time I realised Surly the slow waiter would have cleared it. No problem, we could find our way.

The narrow streets though look very different at night, and it took me a while to find the hotel. Linda is useless at the best of times at navigating and she’d had 1/2 litre of Chianti by then! Find it we did though, and collapsed to rest weary feet after way too much walking.

After all the shennanigans in the terminal it was nice to get back to the dusty, cricket covered patch of land the called the General Aviation apron. Just behind us was a Thomson 757 being prepared for departure back to Gatwick, while we prepared to depart to Siena.

The Mooney has flown just over 11 hours since Martin left Cranfield and headed south, and is holding up well. The brakes which were spongy as anything are improving, the only concern is high oil consumption. While not noticeably losing any we’ve used 3 litres in that 11 hours, higher than normal. We’ve only got one bottle left so may need to find some more soon.

We watched the 757 depart and got a wave from the first officer then jumped into the aircraft to head around the North Corsican coast to Marina di Campo on the island of Elba. Here we’d swap seats and Linda would fly on to Siena.

Calvi looked stunning to our left as we climbed over the bay, while the mountains to our right looked impressive but forbidding. There is still snow on some of the inland mountains. There was some low cloud near Bastia but none to trouble us at 5,000ft.

The island of Elba soon appeared ahead of us, with a big lump of rock between us and Marina making radio comms difficult until about 10 miles out as we were descending over the sea.

Marina di Campo is a 900m runway with hills on 3 sides. My approach was from the bay towards the hills so was easy. We had a follow-me van to park us on the grass. Then an official looking bloke in a green jumpsuit turned up. Fearing the first taste of Italian bureaucracy he asked us to bring the aircraft documents to the terminal…

…where they glanced at the registration document and waved us on. Five minutes and €49 later we’d filed a flight plan (they charged €5 for that – we used our own paper, all he did was fax it!) and headed off for a drink before launching on the next sector.

Linda was then flying to Siena for our next stop. Departing towards a massive hill of about 2500′ you turn right and fly up a valley, then left up another valley until you reach the sea. Good views, not advisable in dodgy weather!

Said dodgy weather was waiting on the mainland. To get to Siena we had a ridge of hills 3500′ high to get over, but near the coast the cloud was 500′ below that. Fortunately it lifted and we made it, then having to descend to land at Siena. One perfect landing later from Linda and we were in Tuscany.

Not much at Siena Airport. Lots of greenery, one NetJets and that’s it. The fire crew put the chocks in, we then waled through their crewroom where they were enjoying lunch and a nice bottle of red. I believe they are going to charge us about €70 for this!

Parked up, tech log written, bags out, cover on. We were done in 15mins and then into a taxi driven by a female Felpe Massa into Siena. €32 for the taxi, one thing this holiday isn’t is cheap!

Photos from this leg are on my MobileMe gallery here!!!

We had a great night in Calvi, and in hindsight could easily have spent another day or two there. However, we had a hotel booked in Siena and had a gap in the thunderstorms forecast to head east into mainland Italy so at 0830 a taxi arrived to return us to the airport.

Where we had perhaps THE most shocking service ever. You pay the landing fee at the Chamber of Commerce desk. Only one of the women there spoke rough English, this despite about 200 Brits just arriving on a Thomson 757. We needed to file a flight plan, but after sending us around a corner to a computer to do it she then informed us it was broken. So shegsve us a number to call. They payphones we all credit card type and she wouldn’t let us use her phone.

When we finally got through on the mobile a ramp guy in jeans and a t-shirt took us through security, who didn’t give a toss that we bleeped and had laptops and a knife in our bags. Then the ramp nutter sped across the apron behind the Thomson, waited for us to unload our own bags and began to drive off before I’d gotten the boot shut. Charming. All I can say is thank God the bowser topped us off yesterday.

So, although our landing and parking came to only €28, the service left a lot to be desired and most unusual for a French airport. We never were offered to be taken to the Meteo officer on station but we’d checked all that on the free wifi. We’d have filed the flight plan ourselves save for the fact that the poxy British AFPEx system won’t let me in again!

Rant over, on with the holiday.