The eve of departure

The last couple of days have been crazy. Although the routing is more or less the same, there have been so many changes that the planning has taken almost as long again. It is now finished. The weather looks OK but I still haven't decided whether to turn left or right at the channel. Mist is forcast until 9:00am so I will look at the latest forecasts in the morning before submitting the final flight plan. Heard today that Szyczyany is closed (probably because noone could spell it). That means I will now have to go to Gdansk in order to have enough fuel to route round Russia to get to Lithuania. Oh well I didn't expect it to go smoothly.

The route - 6 days to go

Planning has been completed. All the charts have been packed, the bottlang airfield manual has been updated. Also new technology is helping. This time I will have all the charts, all the airfield plates, rules and regulations on the PC as well as on paper. That way I can restrict the paperwork to about 8 kilos.

All the permissions from last year have been repeated and so far all except Slovenia have obliged. Hopefully that will come through in the next couple of days.

The trip approaches

Last year my attempt to circumnavigate europe by microlight was foiled by apalling weather. After 4 days stuck in Albenga Italy, with no prospect of improvement, the trip turned into a circumnavigation of France. Enjoyable though that was, I wanted to repeat the attempt this year.
This time I have a different aircraft G-TREX. This is a Pioneer 300. It is heavier (560kg) faster (125knots) and has additional complexity of retractable undercarriage and a variable pitch propeller.

The route will be the same as last year, but this time I will make an assessment as to whether the route should be clockwise or anticlockwise according to the weather forecast.