A Weekend Away

It’s never a guarantee that Charlie can be booked out for more than a day at a time unless you’re lucky enough to get two consecutive days falling on a week day and a weekend day (i.e., Friday and Saturday or Sunday and Monday). That’s the way the booking system works and anything different has to go through the syndicate committee. Give them their due, they normally look kindly on such requests unless there’s a good reason not to, and that’s how it was when we asked to take Charlie out over the bank holiday weekend.

As soon as we had the go-ahead for a three-day booking we were making arrangements to stay with friends over in Lincolnshire.

The flight to Wickenby Airfield took about an hour and forty minutes. According to Google Maps it would have taken about three and a quarter hours by road, though seeing all the traffic on the motorways, much of the time at a crawl or standstill, it probably would have taken far longer. Visibility was excellent though the cloud base was fairly low keeping us to an altitude of around 2000ft.

Flying above Rutland Water which, coincidentally, I’d visited about two weeks previously, I got to see how vast this body of water actually is. It’s the largest reservoir in England (by surface area) and is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, a Special Protection Area and a Nature Conservation Review Site. I knew it covered a large area but didn’t really get a feel for its size until I saw it from the air.

As we flew further north-east, the towns and villages got more sparse and the land a lot flatter. The fields were a patchwork quilt of different colour blocks, interspersed with waterways and quiet roads. Rivers following straight lines with barely a meander, stretched for miles before eventually spilling out into The Wash (another impressive geological feature where salt marsh, mudflats and tidal inlets join the land to the sea and a three-sided coastline forms a bay around one of Britain’s broadest estuaries). It was all so different from the busy-ness of our local area. Wickenby airfield was very quiet with just one other aircraft parked up!

Our friends were magnificent hosts and on Saturday, Will took Stav up for a flight to Skegness. In the meantime, Jen and I went into Lincoln, little knowing that it was hosting a Steampunk Festival.

The weather had turned out sunny and warm; the Steampunk outfits were impressive/beautiful/eccentric; I could have spent a fortune in the little independent shops on Steep Hill; and an extended lunch at Bar Unico followed by coffee at the Hilton overlooking the marina was a perfect way to end the day. Dinner that evening was home-made pizza cooked in a piping hot pizza oven in Stav and Jen’s garden. Cooking in that heat took no time at all and the pizzas tasted so much better than from a normal oven – authentic and truly delicious.

After a lazy Sunday morning, it was time to go back to Wickenby and home. The weather had returned to the same as Friday so again, we kept altitude at around 2000ft. We took a slightly different, though similar distance, route but with a tail-wind almost all the way back, we were back on the apron in around an hour and twenty minutes.

We’ve since learnt that Stav has now made enquiries about flight training. Will has decided that we must get a pizza oven for the garden!