PeanutWood

Apocalypse Now

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Last night we saw probably the biggest storm we’ve ever seen in Florida. We both love thunderstorms (unless flying) but this one was frankly scary in places.

The storm kicked off at 8pm while we were on International Drive enjoying the fine Mexican cuisine provided by Don Pablos. The drive home was fun, with visibility reducing to almost zero in places and the sky flashing continuously. Once home though all went relatively calm, some good lightning but nothing special. We sat on the lanai and watched the lightning until about 10pm when the sky cleared. That’s it then.

Or so we thought. At 1am we were woken by almost continuous lightning flashes, and some of the biggest rumbles of thunder we’ve ever heard. On and on it crashed with the rain hammering the windows, and strong winds. A tornado watch was in force as well which gave further cause for concern.

Eventually it started to move away again and we finally got back to sleep just before 3am. The morning started grey but the sun is out again now and its going to be warm and sunny all week, with low chances of rain. Good thing too – after the rain last night the pool is full to the brim, and the lake behind the villa is also rather fuller than it was yesterday afternoon!

Here is a video we took. The killjoys at Facebook managed to wipe it off immediately because we’ve used third-party music on it. I’m sure James won’t mind, it seems very appropriate really…

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Magic Kingdom rope drop

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

Friday saw us spend another day chilling and relaxing by the pool, recovering from the shock of actually getting here. We also spent all day waiting for UPS to deliver, but seems they couldn’t get through the gate at the front of the estate. Whoops.

So today became our first day in Disney of the holiday. We haven’t even been to Downtown yet, most unusual for us. We decided to get up early and head into the Magic Kingdom and witness the opening ceremony that is held every day at Main Street Station.

We probably arrived a bit too early, we expected we’d be allowed onto Main Street – after all, there are shops there and Disney exists to make money. Nope, we we all held in the area between the station and the turnstiles. We got there at 8:20 so spent 30mins milling around waiting for something to happen.

Eventually the Mayor of Main Street arrived and greeted everyone, before the first train of the day brought Mickey, Minnie and the rest of the gang onto the station for the welcoming ceremony. In all the times we’ve been to Disney, this was another first for us and we are glad we got the chance.

We spent the morning in the park – the first couple of hours were very quiet and we got quite a few rides ticked off without any queues. It started busying up at lunchtime, which was when we dived out of the park – and straight back into the pool. Its good to be lazy on holiday!

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Top secret launches

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Yesterday was the quietest day we’ve had on a holiday for some time. Neither of us slept particularly well despite being absolutely shattered from the travel, so we had one aim for the day – get supplies. Once that task was achieved and the villa in order we retired to the pool and lanai and did bugger all for the rest of the day.

In the evening we ventured to TGI Fridays just down the road, home to the most delicious pot stickers and a menu which allows you to eat enough food to feed an African village for just $16. TGI’s also has free wifi, and while sitting letting the pot stickers go down we received a tweet from NASA saying an Atlas rocket was slated for launch. Great news, be good to see another launch.

Problem was, the launch was about an hour away – and we’d not had our main course yet, let alone the slab of cheesecake promised. So we decided to box up the cheesecake (take-out is great in restaurants!) and headed east to East Lake Tohopekaglia, where we figured we’d get a good view of the launch which was slated for 7:52pm.

Arriving on the west shore of East Lake Toho we found way too many rich people with houses which were blocking our view east, so we carried on round, looking for somewhere to stop and watching the clock march towards the launch time. Eventually we came to the town of St Cloud which is on the south shore of the lake, and as we pulled into a car park saw the glow in the sky of the rocket.

Out we jumped from the truck (you can’t call it a car, its huge) and saw the rocket burn skywards leaving a trail of smoke/vapour. The sky was perfectly clear allowing us a view of the rocket for about 5 minutes including seeing the external boosters drop off and fall back to earth.

But why hadn’t we spotted the launch before? We are normally pretty good at checking things like that and would definitely have headed to Space Coast to watch it. It turns out this was an Atlas V rocket on a classified Pentagon mission launching an unmanned space plane, so maybe thats why we didn’t see it on the launch schedules.

Turning back to the truck once the rocket had gone from view I spotted a sheepish looking Linda. It turns out that when she jumped from the car she also managed to kick one of the cheesecakes out, and the box popped open. What a terrible waste of a cheesecake.

Still, I’d recommend St Cloud and East Lake Toho to watch a launch if your in the Orlando area and NASA spring a sudden launch on you.

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Travel shock

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Well, we didn’t see that one coming. Normally we head to Florida in the depths of the UK winter and have to contend with travel chaos such as snow or fog. Little did we know that we would this time be stitched up by clear blue skies and a light northeasterly wind. Unseen to most people that clear blue sky contained volcanic ash, something I’ve never seen in 16 years in aviation in the UK.

Our travel plans started to look shaky on the Thursday they grounded all flights in the UK – but it couldn’t last until Sunday surely? Apparently so, because on Saturday morning Virgin cancelled our flight and rebooked us onto a flight on Wednesday. It must be OK by Wednesday? It looked very doubtful right up until 10pm on Tuesday evening when the government jumped in and said it was suddenly OK to fly. Commercial pressure anyone? Probably the right call but a couple of days too late really.

So Wednesday morning we headed on down to Gatwick. Rather than braving the M25 we took a train from Milton Keynes and changed at Clapham Junction. Dead easy, we’ll do that again – 2:15 door to door. We already knew our flight was delayed and tried everything to get on the earlier flight to no avail. Virgin, bless them, managed to get 5 of 6 aircraft back to Gatwick before the ash closure. Typically the one stuck in Barbados was our aircraft. The VS15 is the last flight of the day out of Gatwick and is renowned for being the one that is shafted, today was no exception. Beardy did give us £20 towards a meal while we waited in a deserted Gatwick terminal for 5hrs.

Eventually we got airborne and landed at Orlando at 10:20pm, arriving at the villa at midnight local time – which is 5am UK time. Given the lack of sleep we’d both had Tuesday night and the early start we’d been on the go for almost 24hrs, and being on the go doing bugger all hanging around terminals and sitting on aeroplanes is hard work – we walked through the front door of the villa, dragged the cases upstairs and went straight to sleep. Unpacking could wait.

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Still enjoying the sunshine

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Well we are now 10 days into our break in the USA. The weather has been pretty much wall-to-wall heat, with temperatures hitting 35C each day and it feels it too. They are threatening the weather to get cooler come the weekend, but who knows? We’ve had a good thunderstorm which was preceeded by loads of electrical storms in the skies. Looked awesome but did nothing to break the heat and humidity.

We’ve not blogged as much this holiday, mainly because we’ve done nothing special. We’ve spent much more time in the villa relaxing – chilling by or in the pool. We’ve been shopping to the outlets and Florida Mall, and we’ve wandered in and out of Walt Disney World as the mood has taken us.

Today we went to Sea World. Not been there since January 2008 and since then a new roller coaster has been spawned – Manta. Linda sampled the pleasures this coaster has to offer three times, including a trip on the front. This coaster you lie down on – the seat rotates so you are hanging down with your head facing forwards, it then throws you through a series of twists and turns and some pretty serious G-forces. Sounds delightful, I got some good pictures of it though.

The shows at Sea World haven’t changed much – although we did mourn (make that chuckle at) the passing of the Budweiser Taste Experience. Now Sea World has been sold this show is cancelled it seems, but hey ho – Bud doesn’t have taste anyway.

Thursday promises to be entertaining. In the morning we are booked on the Segway Around the World tour at Epcot. This is a 2 hour tour where we get shown how to ride a Segway two-wheeled personal transport gadget, then get a guided tour of the World Showcase on them. Should be fun! In the evening we are going to the Magic Kingdom for Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party. Again, we’ve never been to one of these evening soiree’s at the Magic Kingdom, so will be another new experience. In between we plan to return to the villa and make use of the pool.

Its 11pm here, and we are sitting under the lanai by the pool. Its gorgeous, but getting late and we have to be up in time tomorrow to get to Epcot. The best pictures we’ve taken so far can be found on Facebook, for those of you without access (where have you been in the social networking revolution?!) you can click here to see them.

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And … RELAX!

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

Its been a mental month or so recently. We’ve both been way too busy with work and other stuff, and on top of that have been snowed under with a lot of Flying Club work. In one way, this little holiday came at a really bad time. But in many other ways, an ideal time.

This holiday was intended to look for a villa to buy in the USA, but the exchange rate has taken another plummeting and the house prices haven’t fallen by enough to make economic sense, so we decided to just come out and relax. No flying planned, lots of days by the pool and a bit of Disney as well.

We flew out to Orlando on Sunday and are once again staying in Brusons Retreat on Cumbrian Lakes. Arriving on Sunday evening (an hour late thanks once again to the Bearded Pullover) it was great to be able to come to somewhere we knew that was very smart, clean and relaxing. A quick trip to the local supermarket to get some essentials and we were set.

The first two days of our break have been spent chilling out. Both mornings we just relaxed by the pool and in the sun, then ambled off to do some shopping in the afternoon.

On Tuesday evening we decided to head into Epcot for the International Food and Wine Festival. Held around the Showcase Lagoon this is basically lots of small stalls selling food samples from all over the world. There are about 24 stalls in total, selling food from Wellington (NZ) through to Buenos Aires (Argentina). We had some empanadas from Argentina, and some Pot Stickers from China. On top of the food there are lots of local wines and beers to be tried. Linda had a Samuel Adams Cream Stout to try, but at $6 a pint its a bit steep. Didn’t seem to stop many people being a bit bladdered around the Lagoon though. We skipped Illuminations this time and wandered off for an ice cream sundae to finish the evening at one of the Disney hotels near Epcot.

Today we’re off to the Magic Kingdom for our first full day in a theme park. You can tell we’re getting old though – we aren’t leaving the villa until lunchtime whereas a few years ago we’d have been in the park for rope drop!

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Back in Blighty

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

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!

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Nearly home

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

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!

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Where next?

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

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!!!

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