Montmorrilion

After a rather delicious breakfast at Bourg, I was stopped as the guys got in their plans. The operations guy/mower man who we had paid €8 landing fee too explained that unfortunately as we had been parked for 10 mins over 3 hours, we now had to pay for additional parking...€11 !

Departed out of Bourg and it was my time for a technical problem. The iEfis was throwing all kinds of warnings about temperatures being too high... I started to turn back when all of a sudden everything returned to normal so I turned back on course and all was well.

This was going to be a lengthy flight of around 3 hours, so we all climbed up over the hills to 6000ft and pretty much stayed up there barely touching the controls as the air was cool and smooth at altitude.

After quite a long flight, one of my longest, it was time to descend into montmerillion airfield around 20 miles from Poitiers.

This landing strip is 600 meters long, so I was unconcerned about landing, but what I didn't realise is that the runway slopes downwards, and has trees on the approach.  Below 2000ft the air was wild with thermal turbulence and I was really struggling to get the plane down.  I ditched my first approach and went around, this time extending for a long low final under power to clear the trees, dump the power and try to get the plane on the runway.  After floating over the hot grass for what felt like forever, the wheels touched and I hit the brakes stopping just before the end.

Great welcome from Dave and Amanda lord, flying royalty who run a school here who kindly ran a few of us to the petrol station and shops next door for supplies.  Weve enjoyed some baguette, ham, cheese, tomato, fruit and nuts, and beer this evening in the warm evening air which is gradually cooling down.