Krusevo

I was lucky enough to get to Krusevo a few days before all the pilots started showing up.  After a week of sun and beaches with Trudy in Albania, I took a flight to Thessaloniki, Greece.  The organizers of the Euros sent a car for me and I got to enjoy the drive through the Macedonian wine country, some beautiful mountains, peach groves and field after field of tobacco farms.  It was a very pretty four hour drive from Thessaloniki to Krusevo.

The town sits on the side of a mountain range, tucked up into a little curve in the hill.  It's just about 2km from launch and is a charming and cozy little town.  I can't help but wonder how nice it must be covered in snow in winter.  

I met with Ivan and his adorable daughter Sofia and have spent the last three days with them before today when so many pilots have started to arrive.  It was nice to have a relaxing few days getting to know the local Macedonian pilots and the organizers before the busy time starts.  Everyone is warm and friendly and having flying in common makes me feel like I've known them forever.  It's kind of special how we pilots come in to a small village in some out of the way place and turn it into our home for few weeks  I hope the locals enjoy us being here as much as we enjoy getting to know a beautiful new sight like this. 

  

Albania

When I was 14 my dad pastored a church in a tiny town in the mountains of northern New Mexico. The church was on the main street and the parsonage was right next door.  One day in the spring I was out in the front yard and two French girls on a motorcycle came by waving a fistful of envelopes looking for the "post offeeece."  I recall thinking that it looked like they were on the ultimate adventure - two foreign girls exploring the countryside.  So much of my young life was spent daydreaming about traveling to faraway places.  I still have those daydreams and lucky for me, my real life consists of so many of these adventures.

Trudy and I flew from Milan to Corfu on Tuesday.  After checking a hundred different ways to get to the Albanian beaches, turns out that Corfu is closest, with cheap flights and a 45 minute ferry trip across to Saranda, Albania.  Many people asked me why on earth I wanted to come to Albania.  I didn't have any really great answer, just that I had seen pictures of the beaches and they looked cool.  For me, that's as good an excuse as any.  That, and I committed to come help out at the pre-European championships in Macedonia starting in about a week, so I would be close by.  I've said for so many years that hang gliding takes me to places I would never ever think to go otherwise.  

When I close my eyes and try to come up with the greatest adventure I can imagine, it always involves a foreign country (of course), usually one where I can't speak a single word of the language. For me, the ultimate trip involves a hot, dry rural part of some Mediterranean country, a beat up old jeep and a lot of exploring around the countryside.  

Trudy and I picked up a soft-top jeep to check out some areas outside the town of Saranda where we're staying.   There's an UNESCO world heritage sight about a hour drive from here where sometime in the 1920's I think, an Italian archaeologist uncovered an ancient village completely overrun by vegetation.  The village is called Butrint and was settled by exiles fleeing the fall of Troy.   In the center is a castle and it's a cool place to explore - literally cool because there are lots of trees and the paths around the village are all shaded - a very nice break from the heat here.  

The next day we made a second attempt to find another place that is supposed to be interesting.  It's called the Blue Eye and it's a 150 foot deep pool created by a natural spring.  We've now tried and failed to get there twice!  After visiting Butrint the first day, we set out for the Blue Eye coming from the south.  When we got tired of pot hole filled dirt roads and the sun beating down on us in the jeep, we thought we'd give its another try the next day.  After a little lunch and swim in the Aegean, we tried from the west to find the Blue Eye.  This country is much more mountainous than I knew.  The roads that appear on our paper map and even on Google maps on my iPhone are very few and far between.  I suppose because that's all they've got, the roads on the map appear to be highways, maybe not 4 lane divided highways, but at least paved roads.  Ha!  After an hour or so making our way deeper and deeper into the mountains, our highway became dirt road.  We followed it for a while.  The landscape here is very Mediterranean - mostly rocky with small vegetation, if any.  So, we could see our little dirt road switchbacking up the side of the barren hills and presumably eventually bringing us to the Blue Eye.  But, I'm pretty sure we were both having the same silent concerns about the low fuel level, deserted road, and the late hour, so we made the decision that I'm sure my mother would be pleased with, to turn around and work our way back home again.  We made it back into the last little village we passed on our way out, sweaty and sun baked, in search of a white chocolate Magnum.  A small cafe/bar in the center of town was full of small round Albanian men who must have found it funny that we had not a single word of Albanian to try to ask for ice cream.  

We never saw anything terribly notable out there, but the whole trip made me think of the French girls on the motorcycle and the fact that sometimes I get to live my best dreams.  Funny thing is that my travel addiction gets worse with every trip.  Like a drug, it takes more and more exotic locations to get the same gratification....soon, I'm going to have to start looking into space travel ;-).

Here's Trudy with a big announcement at the Butrint amphitheater.

Some local traffic on the way to find the Blue Eye.

One of my favorite ferry crossings ever.

Selfie at Butrint.

View from the second failed attempt to find the Blue Eye.

Breaktime

After nearly 6 weeks and more than 6000 miles, it was time to take a short break from the road trip.  I never imagined I would enjoy 6 weeks of solo traveling so much.  I wasn't alone the entire time.  I got to stop and visit friends in Kitty Hawk, New England, Michigan, Montana and British Columbia and then hang with my baby girl in Bend, Oregon and with family at home in the San Francisco Bay Area.  But the time alone was positively therapeutic.  I must do this again.

I have agreed to help out at the pre-Euros in Macedonia in the middle of August and I wanted to spend a few days on my beach in Florida before flying to Europe.  So, I decided to ditch the car in LA and hop a flight to Orlando.  I've never spent any time in Florida in July, but I actually enjoyed the heat and daily storms.  With a schedule adjustment, there's plenty of time from about 6am till sometimes as late as 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon before the thunderstorms start.  I loved it.

I arrived in Munich a few days ago and after a quick visit with Yves, I've made my way down to Lake Maggiore to hang with Gary & Trudy for a few days.  I love having friends all over the planet.

Next stop, Albania.  

Canadian Nationals - Lumby, BC

The idea for this whole road trip started with my good Canadian buddies Tyler and Rob inviting me to the Canadian Nationals up in Lumby.  Seemed like as good an excuse as any to hit the road for the summer.  After all my national parks and hiking, I was so ready to do some flying on my brand new T2C and there's nothing nicer than a small, relaxed comp with good friends.  Quite a few foreigners also made their way up to BC - Konrad, Dustin, the Rhythm of Flight boys, Bruce Barmakian and Dangerous Dave among several others.  

Lumby is such a cool site.  It's a small valley surrounded by launches on nearly all sides.  Randy and his wife own a beautiful piece of land that they've created Freedom Flight Park - complete with two grass runways, a clubhouse, wifi, showers, camping...everything you could ask for.  The nearest launches surrounding the flight park are relatively small and tend to be earlier sites, so most days we started from a site about an hour an half drive away (bigger mountains and a higher, later launch).  But, goal was normally always back at the flight park so it was very convenient.  Tasks were relatively short (compared to Big Spring and Forbes), but nicely challenging and taking us over beautiful mountains next to a big wide open valley every day.  Talk about easy and relaxing!  Although they said conditions were a bit softer than normal, it couldn't have been more perfect in my eyes.  Lift was generally not much more than 500 fpm and climbs were smooth and soft.  On the last few days we were getting well above 10,000ft and the views really were awesome!

I hope Randy decides to hold the nationals again there next year.  I loved it and would happily make the trek back there again.  We joking talked about spreading the word around that the flying was crap to keep the place totally to ourselves....but that wouldn't be very nice.  It really was fantastic and I'm excited to go back again.  I just hope it doesn't get totally overrun by a bunch of stressy foreigners ;-).  

Close Encounters

Next stop after the Badlands and a quick cruise by Mt. Rushmore was a day visit to the Devil's Tower in Wyoming.  It's not a hugely known site, but any child of the 70's that remembers Richard Dryfus making sculptures in his mashed potatoes will know this place from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  It was a perfect stop between the Badlands and Missoula as it was hardly off the highway at all and it gave me a chance to get out of the car and stretch my legs for a short hike around the tower.  Driving in, it's an impressive site as it seems to just stick out of the middle of nothing but prairie land.  It would be interesting to speak to a geologist about how this thing came to protrude out of the middle of nowhere.  I was too lazy to listen to the ranger talk and just preferred to hike the loop around it and admire the giant columns that make up the tower.  They're actually much bigger than they appear in the first picture.  Notice in the second one, the size of the climber working his way up the side.  

The prairie road coming into the park is full of adorable prairie dogs, dozens of them that peek their little heads up from their holes in all the open fields.  Reminded me of the ones at Big Spring.

The Highlight of my Roadtrip

I never dreamed I would find one of the coolest places on my summer roadtrip in South Dakota. Who even knew there was anything in South Dakota?  

I left my new favorite northern city of Minneapolis around midday for the 7 or so hour drive to the eastern edge of the Badlands National Park.  I had my new little Volvo all set up for car camping, with a super cool portable shower, tea kettle and mini blender for morning shakes and comfy memory foam mattress in the back.  It's definitely not outback roughing it or anything, but it was fun not being in a hotel.  I arrived at the park entrance just in time for a gorgeous sunset and a ranger talk. This place is cool...not like Yosemite chock full of tourists, busses, and a fancy lodge and shops.  Really there wasn't much of anything other than a campground and a mini amphitheater where they have several nice telescopes to view the night sky.  With almost zero light pollution, the sky was amazing!

Car camping in the little campground was an adventure thanks to sizeable storm that blew through around 2am the first night.  In the talk that the rangers gave that evening, they told about the storms that came through on Friday (this was Monday night) that produced 2 tornados.  So, when I was awoken by freight train-like wind noise in the middle of the night, it scared the crap out of me.  I jumped up and out of the car to find all of the other campers also out of their tents just watching the spectacular light show and half wondering (as I was) if we should worry.  Turns out, we only got hit by the edge of the giant cell, so nothing all that severe.  But, it did produce the coolest horizontal lightning I've ever seen, nonstop for a solid half hour. 

The hiking in the Badlands is like everything else there, pretty deserted, in the best possible way.  On my first full day there, I went for a 8 mile loop through and around all the rock formations.  I counted exactly 7 other hikers on my trail.  Gotta love that!  I wish I had a good photographer with me to capture the scenery.  My pictures just don't do it justice.

I want to go back...soon!

The Land of Prince & Aveda

If you ignore the eight months of winter, I'm quite certain I could live in Minneapolis.  After leaving Niagara Falls so disappointed, I got to spend a weekend in Minneapolis under the most beautiful blue skies.  This city has now moved up on my list as one of the best cities in the US (along with San Francisco and Boston).  It has gorgeous weather in the summertime and is chock full of fit, active, outdoorsy people cycling, running and swimming around the many picturesque lakes.  I guess all that exercise is necessary as they boast the best donut shop in the country.  I had to check for myself, of course.   And, I loved the Minneapolis Institute of Arts - it rivals the Met (in my opinion).  

Now I think I need a summer house there ;-).

As Long as Niagara Falls

For some strange reason, I have always wanted to see Niagara Falls.  It was right on the route from Pippo's house heading west to BC, so I couldn't resist.  Well...I suppose I'm glad I got that out of the way and I won't likely ever do it again.  It was not at all what I expected.  Although the falls themselves were cool, they've turned the area into a mini Vegas.  Rather disappointing, but at least that one is checked off my list.  

Next stop...my Italian

No way to have a roadtrip without stopping in New England to hang out with my Italian for a few days. Good cooking, great wine and my favorite company.  Filippo's house is slightly out of the way when one is driving from Florida to British Columbia, but I couldn't help myself (and I wanted an excuse to see Niagara Falls).  Massachusetts is great in the summer time - both weeks of it.  Uncle Rhettski's new flight park is under an hour away.  We stopped in to see Rhett and his tandem pilot Anna (who I hope will be on our US girl team very soon).   Also hung out at Pippo's drop zone and watched old men jump out of airplanes all day.  Happy times.

On my last day there, I took a whale watching tour out off of Plymouth.  Didn't get as close to any whales as I would have liked (although this boat did), but we got to see Humpbacks, Minke whales and Finbacks...and heaps of tails.

Kitty Hawk

After my family time back in California I flew back to my car in Raleigh, North Carolina to resume the cross country drive.  Next stop, Kitty Hawk where my good friends Jim, Mitch, Jonny and my teammate Linda are spending the summer doing tandems for the many tourists.  Kitty Hawk is a special place.  In addition to be the birthplace of flight, where the Wright Brothers first took to the air, there is so much outdoor stuff to do there and so many cool people to do it with.  Jonny and Jim have a tandem towing operation and Mitch and Linda were there as the summer help.  

Linda and I had this bright idea to do a tandem together.  I've had a tandem rating for years, but let it lapse a few years back because I just didn't use it.  But Linda keeps her's current and we thought it would be fun to have the entire US women's team in one glider.  It was fun indeed and exciting for sure, thanks to my screwing things up.  I hadn't realized how hard it would be to be completely passive and behave as a passenger, particularly when the tow was getting a big sketchy.  We rolled out and the glider immediately yawed into a sudden cross wind (fairly strong one).  The yawing was ok, but when we started to roll pretty close to the ground, I just couldn't help correcting from the upper harness.  Linda was most definitely the pilot in command, in theory that is.  We specifically discussed it before taking off.  But, I just could not help joining in the piloting and me doing that caused us to overcorrect, banking rather steeply the other directly then.  Well, now that I had us really out of whack, I couldn't just leave well enough alone and "helped" correct back the other direction.  Aside from being a bit sketchy, it really was hilarious to see two girls completely over controlling this docile tandem glider.  We eventually got it together and laughed our asses off, but not before the GoPro snapped a pretty funny shot of our reaction.  

(I helped out a bit on the landing too ;-)

In addition to the tandem fun, I got my new glider test flown and we enjoyed gorgeous beach weather the whole time.  It was hard to leave (as usual).

Home for a bit....

I broke up the driving portion of my summer roadtrip by hopping a quick flight out to California for a bunch of family events (Amber's baptism, Ally's birthday and Dillon's graduation).  Sometimes- I don't know how- I forget what a cool family I have and how much I love spending time with them, even if I don't care much for California these days.  

My niece and nephew Emma and Dillon took me for a hike in a new National Park near my hometown.  The park isn't new, my parents used to take us hiking there when I was a kid, but it's been newly named as a national park.  We wanted to find rattlesnakes.  The adults warned us that there were heaps of them there and that we should be very careful.  They weren't joking.  Emma and I stepped right over the top on one sunning itself in the middle of the narrow trail.  We would never have seen it had Dillon and his keen eye not spotted it.  We also saw California condors, an amazing huge lizard (some variety I had never seen in California) and many other birds of cool varieties.  

Back on the road, I'm missing my family. 

Road Trip

I feel like I'm on summer vacation - I suppose because I am, but also because it feels like the kind of trip my family used to take on summer break when I was a kid - loading up the car and getting out on the road driving across the country.  I blame my parents for my overdeveloped sense of adventure....and for that, I am also eternally grateful.

There is this constant tension between longing for home and the tug of the open road.  So, after a month at home, I set off from Florida about two weeks ago, bound (ultimately) for the Canadian Nationals at Lumby, BC.

I've been called a beach girl more than a few times in recent months, so I started the trip off with a tour up the east coast from Satellite Beach with a plan to check out every nice looking beach between Satellite  and Kitty Hawk.  Although the beaches are not even a tiny bit similar, it reminded me of my drive up the east coast of Australia last November.  There are so many more cool beaches than I ever realized between Florida and Virginia.  I spent several days sleeping next to the beach and waking up in the morning going for an early run then a swim in the ocean.  I even had a lovely swim in the water off Oak Island, South Carolina where the sharks were thankfully not as hungry as they have become in the last few days.

The Rhythm of Flight

I met Wolfi Siess about ten years ago at the French Nationals in Laragne.  I was there with Gerolf Heinrichs who was flying the competition and coaching a few new young Austrian pilots.  One of those guys was Wolfi.  To this day, I carry such fond memories of photographing their launches and landings.  For the entire week, Wolfi was one pilot that brought a giant smile to my face every time he came in to land - and it was all because of the giant smile on his face.  Still now, I can't recall ever seeing someone that enjoys flight the way Wolfi does.  I love these pics of Wolfi nearly 10 years ago!

Wolfi and his good buddy Jonas from New Zealand are embarking on a super fun project this summer in the US (I'm so envious!).  They'll be traveling around the country and promoting our sport from a young pilot's perspective.

Anyone who is paying attention to hang gliding is well aware that we are a quickly aging group. I would be curious to see the statistics, but from my experience organizing competitions for the last eight years, I can say that we're seeing the same group of pilots that have been on the competition scene for the last 15+ years.  Not that I don't love them all, each and every one, but there is no question we cannot sustain the sport without an infusion of new, young pilots.  

The boys' plan is to start at the Flytec Race & Rally in May and the travel from there across the US filming their adventures and meeting up with some world famous guys in the process (world record holder Dustin Martin, Australian champion Jonny Durand, top US pilot Zac Majors and many others I'm sure).  Their video description of the project details their plans better than I can here, so give it a watch.

If you're as excited about their project as I am, take a look at their website at www.rhythmofflight.com and help the boys out a bit with a donation to their Indigogo project HERE.

Yep, it's Over :-(

...and it's that time - short packing time.

New World Champion

It was a slight bummer to end on a cancelled day, but everyone is tickled to have Christian Ciech as our new world champion.  Congratulations Christian on a strong and consistent performance.  He really was on fire throughout the entire competition.  If not for one day with a broken VG rope, he would have had a sizable lead over Antoine in second place.  

Another big congratulations to Antoine in second place and Christian Voiblet in third.  All three pilots are very deserving. 

We had an impromptu "crowning" up at launch.  Christian Voiblet is still in the hospital, so couldn't be there, of course.  But someone had the fantastic idea to call him in his hospital room while everyone cheered and chanted "Christian, Christian, Christian!"  Very sweet...there were plenty of tears. 

Italy won the team competition...again...with France and second and Australia in third.  There was no champagne on launch, so Miguel, the organizer, sprayed the teams with RedBull ;-).