March, 7th

Serpentine

Today we explored the first stretch of our route by car. We passed beautifully situated coastal villages while driving on a four-lane highway toward Banbury. As we approach the airfield with the help of our GPS we can already make out two trikes in the air which were being flown by Brendan Watts and Paul Colley. Brendan is the owner of South West Microlights, a training school, and upon our arrival the both of them are busy taking passengers over the city and towards the beach. His airplanes are in immaculate shape and differ from ours in some ways. His trikes are equipped with thin nets to protect the propeller against pebbles that may fly up from behind the front wheel. That is a convincing concept - and so we order two of those! While Brendan and Paul continue to fly their customers around, we are greeted by David Rebettes. He is on the executive committee of the Australian Microlight Association - and he had already heard about our adventure - as well as Giselas unfortunate accident. With David we are able to discuss our computer problems. He offers to try and use our password to access the net via OzeMail. If that works, it shows us that we are dealing with a defect pc or modem. And if he can't get access - than the problem obviously lies with Telekom and OzeMail...

David also takes a floppy disc that contians our diary-entry for today and some digital pictures. Our friend Dominique in New York gets one copy and translates it to English and Dirk Borchers, our webmaster, gets the German version to post it on our website asap.

While we are waiting for Paul Coffey, we watch the arrival of a plane belonging to the Royal Flying Doctors. They are part of this legendary Australian health-service that provides medical assistence to patients even in the remotest areas and offers local treatment or transportation to the nearest hospital. Paul supplies us with the maps we are still missing for some of the areas on our route and gives us direction for the best way to get to Bremer Bay. Here his suggestion:

First, fly along the coastline from Serpentine to Banbury, where the river makes a curve towards South you go straight and follow the high-power lines untill you reach Kojonup. Here we are to land and meet up with a friend of Pauls who will organize fuel. Flying from Banbury to Albany, at the southern tip of the continent without re-fueling, would be impossible for us. That all sounds good and dandy - but flying with your finger on the map is a lot easier than flying the trike with strong winds and heavy thermals! The winds did change today and even in the early morning you could feel hotter air coming from the North. Around noon the winds change directions and blow from the seaside. Lateron we see some cirrus-clouds that announce the passage of a weather front. In the evening, right around sunset the sky is covered almost entirely by fleecy clouds. After we returned to the airfield that evening, we get the last recommendation of the day: Fred Long has a relative in Norseman who could look for a place to stay for us and might even be able to drive us back to the airfield the next morning. We couldn't help but think that they all seem to know each other in the aviation-community - and that everyone is trying hard to help us out! What an extraordinary hospitality!!!