La Motte du Caire 29 years after

 

View north of the site

Map and photo taken from https://worldcam.eu/webcams/europe/france/8705-la-motte-du-caire-gliding-club 

Warm and dry in La Motte du Caire

 The weather looks good for gliding at La Motte today. Sometimes you can't tell from a photo if it's good gliding weather. The 23rd August 1996 conditions were difficult with small thermals over the mountains, so the turns had to be tight. Tight turns are steep and the flying speed needs to be faster or your glider stalls (i.e. it stops flying and falls) but since you're turning, your glider then spins, which is interesting. 

La Motte du Caire airfield

Some gliders are better in the mountain conditions of Provence than others. Some gliders are more prone to spinning than others, especially if they're near the upper weight limit.

You can get out of a stall or a spin, and it's part of initial training that you learn to do that. And hope that you never stall or spin near the ground, or near another glider beneath you.

A stonking day promises

 Looking at today's weather at La Motte du Caire, a stonking day promises.

The light is right, and the pilots know it because they've already rigged so many gliders and are milling for the briefing.

Would that I were there

Father's day and a father's day

The Sunday in June that is Father's day is also near to dead husband's birthday.
Here's a photo I took of him very soon after we met. It's on the cliffs near Hastings somewhere. One weekend he would come visit me and another weekend I'd go up to his, and we'd go gliding, usually staying in a tent somewhere, even in November. When he came to Hastings we would go out walking, meet my work colleagues, and even get to the occasional party, though parties were more frequent once we lived in Hampshire.

The photo is a bit of a mess because we had it so long and without a frame for it, and our cats, Hobbledy and Pixie, had a chew and a scratch at it.
Years later, his brother returned me a copy I'd given him in the late 1970s, a pristine clean copy, but I never made a scan of that because this is the one I had on the family web site for years, since the earlier 2000s. I published it with a link under it to a private wiki I had created of his life, school, university, hobbies. but I never developed that wiki much and the family web site has gone now so here he is again. If you want to know about him, then google for Oxford University quadraphonics.

In 2014, my father was still around for Father's Day despite his recent heart attack. D.G. I still had one of my favourite men.

La Motte

http://www.jm-foto.com/2007/La-Motte/index.htm

I found this wonderful series of photos about gliding at La Motte, taken by one of the German visitors to the gliding club. I remember the excitement of the trip after coming off the motor way, reaching the Col, driving round the craggy castle of Sisteron, and back north to La Motte, breathless at the awesome splendour of the mountain tops. And that's before we start gliding. Look at these photos.

and these http://www.cvvmc.com/index.php/en/webcams

Another father's day

 Another year, another father's day, another birthday

Gliding field at La Motte du Caire, end of the day

Not
http://www.cvvmc.com/index.php/en/webcams

Belonging to sports clubs

"Tell us about sports clubs you have belonged to", asked a Toastmaster.
Now I belong to a tae kwon do club, where I kick people, or rather I get kicked, cos the idea is that it's a defensive martial art, and I should be able to block kicks and punches. I like the club, not only because of it being a fun way to get and keep fit, but also cos I learn new things, things I find hard to do and so I achieve when I do them. And on top of that, it's a mixture of people training, old and young. I'm probably the oldest in the club, but I train with 16 year-olds and even with six-year-olds. That can be fun.
Decades ago, I joined a gliding club. As a young single woman, I immediately realised this was a good idea for the amount of talent on the field, literally on the gliding field. Many healthy young men with enough energy, intelligence and money were out on that gliding field. You have to have a job and some money to afford to fly. So there weren't many women competing for attention but plenty of men: tall men and short men, men in the services and men at the local university. Some were highly educated, but one, learning I was teaching English as a Foreign Language to non-native English speakers, said, "Oh great! I'm trying to get my English 'O' level." That was not a good pick-up line for me. One young man was tall and blond and beautiful and intelligent - he hardly noticed me. Another somewhat plump chap with straggly whiskers would come on the field in wearing green operating theatre pyjamas being a trainee doctor. The summer of 1976 was incredibly hot so the pyjamas were understandable because they were so comfortable. I discarded him because of his desert's disease (wandering palms).  My language students and I had to beg lifts out to the airfield, and one day a curly haired young man with thick rimmed 1960 style glasses and a geeky jumper picked us up in a big white Volvo estate. Not trusting his driving I sat in the back but leaned over to remark on all the fancy dials on his car's dashboard. That drew his attention to me. When we'd finished gliding, that evening, several of us went out for a meal together, foreign students, green pyjamas, blond beauty, geeky glasses and I. Then we went back to someone else's for a drink. But finally, geeky glasses and I finished the evening together for coffee.
 
Fellow toastmasters, I married him.

Mourning

RIC

I sketched this forty years ago. I am still pleased that I captured his firm jaw, the way his glasses hid his eyes, his unruly hair, and the slight irritation because he did not want me to sketch him.
Twenty years ago, on holiday we woke to a beautiful morning like this at La Motte du Caire. Those are the mountains where later that day, he died.
Yesterday, his brother rang me to tell me their mother has died. His brother is the last of that family - lonely.

Mourning this morning.

La Motte du Caire airfield today

Gone to roost

And a vine lot of trouble

It's interesting how many poultry derived idioms we have in the language, isn't it?  And now so few of us have hens, we've forgotten or don't realise where they came from:

• gone to roost,
• pecking order
• flown the coop
• hens' teeth (they don't have any)

We went out yesterday to old gliding and Oxford friends' 40th wedding anniversary.

 "You need tolerance, perseverance and wisdom"

 to keep a marriage that long said a friend who raised a toast. May my son and his fiancée, marrying on Oct 25th at Newark, have those gifts too.

When we came home, it was past dusk and the hens had flown the coop and gone to roost. I had had to hunt the garden in the dark, till I found two of the three in the vine. "Vine lot of trouble" remarked my husband! The third hen, Lady Grey, didn't turn up till this morning, and now all three are happily eating left over rice curry from a few days ago. Cluck, cluck, clllcckk! Happy hens.

Never ever give up

Remember.

The end of another gliding day.

Gliding weekends (sunny Sunday with friends)

Gliding incidents used to be the staple of my social conversation.  Sunday evenings would be spent in the pub reviewing the weekend's gliding activities: who'd gone solo, who'd earned a medal, who'd landed out.

My gliding club friend, having finished her Open University studies, is returning to normal sociability.  She invited husband and me, along with several others from gliding days for lunch on what must have been the first warm Sunday of the year.

Her dog, Hendrix, hid in the shade beneath our table, while we compared notes on our now grown children, our waning careers, and pension prospects. the mortgages we've paid off, and the 16% interest rates we started with.  Gliding we hardly mentioned, apart from remembering the scandal when an early solo pilot misjudged his height so badly that he failed to return to the air-field, attempted to land on a local parade ground, yet was so low he missed that too, and as he glided into a street, wrapped the K7 glider round a lamp post so that his cockpit nose ended up in the first floor  bathroom of a local house, whence the owner dragged him to safety.

It was a memorably embarrassing incident at a politically difficult time because the MOD was trying to sell the airfield, and despite a question about our airfield's safety consequently being asked in Parliament, the incident was effectively hushed up, forgotten and the airfield sold.  But, though we didn't know the culprit, we were all ab-initios or early solo pilots too at the time, and we remember it.  I expect culprit and house-owner remember it too - a talking point for their Sunday reminiscences.

Photo (by Terry Morgan) from the local paper 1982.

Holidaying in Shropshire

At 9 o'clock in the evening, the children are at the top of the youth hostel, helping another child make a jigsaw. I sip a glass of rose and husband's had Severn Valley Railway Manor Ale. The dining room has just emptied of the last family to eat - another pair of grandparents and two of their grandchildren - so we're not the only potty people to revert to youth hostelling in old age.

Today husband drove us to the Long Mynd, then walked the children for an hour and a half over the hills while I drove on to a car park where we met up before visiting the Midlands Gilding Club just another mile over the moor. We enjoyed a filter coffee and I showed the children gliders - a Skylark 4 - I used to have one - and we watched people rigging a K6. Granddaughter got interested enough to start photographing gliders, inside and out, and their trailers too.

The weather wasn't yet good enough to launch anything, but you could see the clouds for miles, over to the sea. And the colours of the heather on the moor was beautiful. The vertiginous road up from Church Stretton provides wonderful views of the vale.

In the afternoon we visited Ludlow Castle where the children ran round merrily. Raf is being a pirate at the moment, so the castle gave him an opportunity to evade the navy, and to wave his (floppy orange) sword. Wearing a green bandanna, an orange plastic gun thrust into his trouser pocket and an orange tea sheet, he looks dressed the part.

La Motte du Caire

from http://cvvmc.free.fr/webcam.php

Barbecue and gliding

Friends from a local gliding club (localish) have invited us to a barbecue in August. It will be nice to see them again as it's some years since we last went. They sent us a link to some of their pictures on another club's site, here, in Scotland. They have some wonderful videos of gliding flights. And they put up photos by other well remembered names, one of whom works with a neighbour. Small world.

Anyhow, I've asked for three tickets as husband and perhaps son will come too. I may need more tickets as we will have Austrian visitors in August again, and daughter is coming home to help look after them. Hurray!

Gliding again

Here's the P1 (first pilot) who took me up for a flight yesterday. Many thanks to him too for organising the reunion. People were already there when I arrived around lunch time. We signed the insurance forms and put our names on the list for a guest flight.

Take off

Circuit and landing

Some of us had forgotten how cold it gets on an airfield, and shivered in too flimsy scarves and cloaks.

At four o'clock we gathered together in the Brown Elephant.

Our erst-while chairman gave us a short history of the club. Its original aims were:

• to make gliding accessible, affordable and enjoyable for people who might not otherwise take part
• a "self help" organisation
• to encourage an interest in glider engineering and flying

There were also heaps of albums and photos around, including the newspaper one of the K14 after an early solo pilot didn't make it back to airfield, was too low for Queens Parade, tried to land in a street, and ended up climbing from his cockpit through a bathroom window.


There was a super slide show too. So after the talk we stood and looked and reminisced for a while before repairing to our old Lasham haunt: the bar.

Gliding

Today is the Royal Aircraft Establishment Gliding Club reunion.

I used to glide a few moons ago. It is good to go to a reunion and meet old pilots, some still flying. I liked this photo we took at the interuniversity gliding competition. I was going to send it to the Open University Sesame magazine , but I never got round to it.

The glider is my Skylark 4, which I shared in a syndicate with three others. I've scanned and uploaded some other old gliding photos to my flickr site here. I have added photos from the Hobbits party because there's a lot of glider pilots at that party. See here.

Snow on the air field

I like to look at the view across the gliding field at La Motte du Caire. You can see it here on the club's web cam. A couple of days ago the clouds scurried across a grey sky, but today the light seems to have fader faster and there is snow on the ground.