Made it!

Hi all; after a smooth flight, followed by a drive up to Wolfsburg in the rental car, Helge met us and we swapped some instruments around in UX (the LS1-f I'll be flying). Unfortunately the 3 loggers I was to be using were delayed in the mail, so Helge will be sending them on with the South African pilot who is flying VS. The weather looked fantastic - at least 5000ft cloudbase and beautiful cumulus all over the sky.

The glider looks great, and after a good night's sleep at Swaantje's house we set off in the Opel Omega that is to be our transport for the next month. We got almost to the Czech border before the first little problem hit - overheating! The temp was sitting above 100 degrees but we found we could nurse the car along by keeping below 90kph on the flat and about 60 on hills. After a very slow patch of heavy traffic near Prague we decided not to attempt the whole trip in one day, and pulled into a motorway motel for pizza and bed.

Next morning an early start saw us on the road by 7am, but the Czech motorways are real boneshakers in places and we found that in combination with the overheating we were only making about 70kph average. Then problem number 2 hit - after pulling over to investigate a strange scraping sound, we found that the jockey wheel must have hit the highway on a particularly rough patch, and the plastic wheel had been bashed off on the road surface!

The border with Slovakia eventually passed, and the weather was rapidly deteriorating. We hit the rain shortly after and it stayed with us for the remainder of the journey. In one place one half of the road was completely washed away.

We finally arrived in Prievidza in torrential rain, parked the glider, booked into the Oaza hotel (very pleasant) and found Peter and Mandy for dinner. Unfortunately the forecast is for more rain for the next several days, so there might not be a flying blog entry for a while!