Here, there and everywhere...

Welcome back. We spent some time relaxing at Monza's. I learned how not to eat porridge, black pudding and all that. How I miss those barbeques now *sigh*.

Anyways, soon enough Dribbler joined us from...err...wherever he came from. It seems like Kettering is a nice, peaceful place and our laughter and talking and singing was too much for the small town so soon enough we were politely asked to leave, never to come back (well, maybe MG will be able to come back)


Another early departure, this time under heavy rain. Next stop: Liverpool, to meeth that darn scouser: Pabloh!

Silent sleepy farms and fields below...

Only a few minutes and we are already flyong over Liverpool. According to my gps, somewhere down there you should be able to spot Penny Lane. Mmmh...guess Microsoft didn't go into much detail whne designing Liverpool. Well, who cares?
The only recognizable feature I could find, after flying around in circles was the Radio City Tower.
PD is growing impatient and, bearing in mind that he is carrying a pickaxe, I decide not to delay the landing anymore. Soon enough, we have landed and met Pabloh. Now this is growing into quite a lively crowd!
Damn! Is good to see das cheeky scouser in person! Thanks to him, I learned that I didn't have to actually make any sense to be part of the forums. The whole multi-national, multi-lingual crowd goes around for a tour around Liverpool. Me and Eric had the greatest idea: yell to the top of our lungs "We hate the Beatles!!!". Nobody seemed to care, except for Puma, Drib, PD, Argento and Yoda that almost strangled us before we had time to say that it was a joke.

As we are on a tight schedule, I will not tell everything we did at Liverpool. Let's just say that when we finally boarded the plane again, Pabloh and PD both carried some big chunks of bricks, straight from "The Cavern"!

Come on, hurry up! There's still so many friends to pick up!

Wondering where are we heading now? Plymouth, to go whale hunting! Oh, yes, and maybe meeting Kay there.

We need some more fuel for the final leg of our English tour. Meanwhile, I just was told that whaling boats are no more. I traveled this far in vain! What has the world come to when a nice guy can't go do some good whalingh with his friends? Anyways, we meet Kay. She is standing there, and I finally get to see her famous "serious" look. Of course, only shallow people looks at the corners of a mouth to tell if someone is smiling. If you look carefuly into Kay's eyes, you will find that she is smiling. And smiling big.

Anyways, in the blink of an eye, she is surrounded by the guys. Specially Murray, who keeps asking about the schoolgirl uniform. I should have tied him down and left him in the plane.

Time to call a night. So we will spend some time enjoying Plymouth's beauties and the company of Kay, Murray, Drib, Monza and Pabloh.

See you soon!

Murray, Monza Gorilla...

Finally, while the rest went to spend some days in London, I got myself a nice little Mooney Bravo to go pick up some of our English friends. So soon I am on the road again, departing from Heathrow.
Of course, such a small planes is great for some sightseeing so here are some of the most typical views of London.




Time to get to work! It's a short ride to Cambridge and the day is not so bad, temp.10ºC and just a little hint of fog so soon we are arriving at Cambridge. Just before landing, we passed right to this building. I have no idea what it is (it is not part of the Cambridge University, I think), well...Murray will have to tell us!

By the way, for your information, this plane comes with the latest technology: the Garmin glass cockpit. Nice, functional and filled with info. Great for IFR (instrument flying).

Cambridge airport and Murray is already there!

As soon as he sees us, he starts to laugh. And we haven't even spoke! It's great to finally meet him. We spend the morning going around Cambridge, and I discover it is even more enjoyable to talk with him in person than it is over the net. We have just too much to talk about.

Nice little town, Cambridge. He takes us to Parker's Piece, which is a flat, empty space with two strips of asphalt and just a lampost in the middle called "Reality Checkpoint". Errr...I look at Pumpdoc, Eric and Puma to see if they get the joke, but they stare at me blankly. British humour is not for everybody!
Oh, well. Time to go back to the plane! Next stop: Kettering, to pick up our good old Monza Gorilla.

Sadly, I still have no photoreal scenery of U.K. so it's hard to navigate with the help of landmarks (which is called VFR, visual flight). Anyways, soon I find the southern fields around kettering and turn back north to land at Denethorpe, an old RAF airbase. Just then it starts raining.



It's a short trip to Kettering, proud birthplace of John Profumo! Bet most of you young ones don't know who John Profumo was (unless you like to read about history or spy novels). You should ask MG ;) I would take everything he says with a pinch of salt, though, because he is so darn British it's very hard to tell when he is joking and when is he being serious.

Well, right now he is joking and giving us a tour around Kettering and its surroundings.

They have a sign near Kettering that says "Irthingborough Road" instead of "Irthlingborough Road". Har har har! Yeah, I know, it gets old after a while.
Anyways, we spend the night here and MG shows us all his F1 stuff. We stayed up all night chatting with MG and Murray. Eric and Murray get along real well and they look like a comic duo. It's hard to keep up with them.

From here we will go to Liverpool to get Pablo...so stay tuned!

Last Plane to London...

While the increasingly bigger crowd of passengers went off to savor the beauties of Boston and surroundings, I arranged a meeting with some of Vitantonio's "relatives" to find a proper way to cross the ocean. One of them (you'd never guess his name: Vito) offered me a bargain: a brand new Airbus 380, the Moby Dick of the skies.

This Leviathan is the biggest commercial plane, and they offered it to me almost free of charge (well, we would have to carry some packages to Europe, "for their less fortunate relatives in the Old Continent"). Anyways, we shook hands and we would have to go to JFK Airport to find our little bird.

Due to some strange glitch in the FSX's flight planner, I was unable to plot a reasonable course across the Ocean. The program insisted on plotting a course that would take us all across Canada, up to Alaska an then turning east to flight over Groenland, Iceland and then back south to London. I felt too lazy to edit the course manually to make it more reasonable, plus the fact that many vans parked outside Eric's house was starting to make us all nervous.

So, earlyin the morning, we left down south for JFK. It was a foggy day in the east coast. There, at JFK, was our contact: another of Vintantonio's cousin, also named Vito. He led the way to a huge hangar and this is what we found inside:

This is HUGE! It is going to be a long trip, but don't worry, as you can see, the luxury interiors will make for a pleasurable cruise (I hope)
This looks complicated. Somebody pass me the instruction's manual, please. It's a gigantic book with thousands of pages. No, Eric, not that one. That one has just 780 pages and says "Ferrari". What? Oh yes, it's just something a friend of mine gave me. I was thinking to have it photocopied as soon as we arrived to England....you know, there's no harm in that is it?

This time I have Ankit and Eric in the cockpit with me. Eric tries to convince me that this can't be harder to drive than a 1982 Camaro, but I have my doubts. Even more so once we start accelerating down the runway and the plane never seems to lift off the ground.
Finally, just when we are about to run out of space, the plane slowly gets airborne.

Would have loved to give you some pictures of NYC but unfortunately, it was all covered with clouds and fog so no I couldn't get any shots worth posting.
This one, tough, makes for a nice pic, with the moon up there.

Cruising north, past Albany. The route will not take us close to any major city, so it is going to be a little boring. Sorry for that!

Hey, look! It's us! Hi, us!

13,000 feet above Hudson Bay...

We left past the afternoon and the sun is starting to set. Eric and Ankit went back to join the others. Apparently they are all having a battle of songs, and Katy is giving free dance lessons to the guys. Yoda surely can dance! Pumpdoc and Puma are with me now. PD telling us lots of anecdotes. Puma can switch from looking mortally serious while talking about some subjects to totally funny in a minute. All this makes the long, boring cruise through barren lands so much funnier!
Those clouds look menacing but oh so beautiful...


The sun sets once again on our trip as we finally turn east at the limits between Canada and Alaska. Time for the Flying Dutchman to turn on its navigation lights!

Well, I spent the whole night trying to find a place to refuel. Of course, there was no suitable airport so I was forced to cheat a little. Let's just say that somwhere during the night we refuelled..ahem! Anyways, it's already morning (we are travelling east, so morning comes really fast as we cross the different time zones) Below us, the deserted lands of northern Groenland.

Finally we can see the British coast! Can you see all those lines in the GPS? Those are boundaries between different flying spaces. British airspace is crowded with hundreds of different zones! Guess these darned Brits can't be happy unless the find a complicated way of doing simple things...

Scottish highlands are right below us. We are almost there!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Heathrow!
Everybody leaves the plane to enjoy some days touring around London.Meanwhile, I will go look for a small plane to pick up Kay, MG, Muzza and Pablo...they live too close to London and I can't use the A380 to pick them up. So I will probably hire a small plane and bring them all here to meet the rest...Oh yes, Pumpdoc is coming with me because of some bricks he and Pablo are going to get...I hope it is nothing illegal, I wouldn't want Vitantonio's generous family to get involved in anything illegal because of us!

See you soon.

Doctor Bob Gordon Shops Hot Dogs From Boston

On the road again and our last moments on American soil. I must say that I will never get tired of discussing things with Puma, for even if we disagree many times he is a joy to listen to. Yoda shares all his experience, too. Of course, we start joking like kids every five minutes. Argento and PD meanwhile keep telling lots of stories from the old days of F1.

The younguns (Kathy, GFG and James) have started a battle of songs. Somebody bring some duct tape! Yesterday I stood up late with GFG and he told me many things about everyday life in India. It was really interesting until I was just too drunk to understand what he said. Which was OK, as he was too drunk as well, and his stories turned into some unintelligible babble.

Ecap told me to take good care of his plane while he was away. As if I didn't know how to properly flight this thing!!!!

We woke up late, but we managed to have a quick lunch before getting back on the plane. A beautiful day once again, and we are off to Boston!

Everything went smoothly as usual until, about 10 minutes after departure, I heard some strange noise and then a loud BANG!

Ooops...



According to the plane's manual, that smoke shouldn't be there and I had to turn off the left engine.
Yoda, James and Puma embarked in a discussion on how these planes were built to survive these accidents. GFG decided to recall every single tragic air accident in history. PD and Argento gave us an in deep lesson on how to curse both in English and Spanish. I was trying hard not to piss in my pants. And Kathy seemed most calm than the rest of us!

Thankfully, these planes really are built to fly even on just one engine. We kept flying east as there were no suitable airports around for landing. I decided to fly non stop until Boston.

After a short but rather tense flight, finally we arrive at Logan Intl. A busy airport but we had priorioty for landing due to the failure.

"Thank you for flying and I hope you enjoy your stay in Boston" is all I can say while everybody rushes to the exit. Oh, well, I guess I shall have this plane repaired before Ecap is back.

Eric was at the airport. He is even more of a joker in person than he is online. Jokes come and go, while he takes us for a tour around the "generic city of Boston" (yeah, that hurt!) :-p

Anyways, we spent some days visiting the city (I love Boston almost as much as N.Y.) I hired a J-3 Cub which is an ideal small plane for sightseeing. Here are some pics for you, Eric, just to prove you that it isn¡t THAT generic. At least you can tell where the Charles River is, and some buildings.

That's all from Boston for now. We are now hoping that Eric will be a good host because we want another BBQ. What? Chinatown? Darn...I hate chinese food!