Tuesday/Wednesday 19th/20th Travel days

Well everything went as planned and I am now blogging from my bed in the apartment thanks to the free wireless internet from my temporary landlord! I had a nice dinner with LeAnn in Redmond before catching the 11:45pn flight on Tuesday. I had the option to upgrade to first class for $99 so I jumped at that chance since there was no baggage charges in first class and the booze was free. Some of you may not know this fact but it turns out that Scotland is a nation of hard drinkers where the average person seems to be drinking the equivalent of 40 bottles of vodka a year. So of course I had to keep up the tradition. As it turned out a Double G&T was enough to get me to sleep and 3 hours later I awoke to the sounds of the Captain saying Houston was 100 nautical miles away. Very happy.

Had breakfast at Houston and had to wait 3 hours until the next flight but the time passed pretty quickly as I took free trips on the terminal shuttle train transport to pass the time. The next flight was on a small Brazilian ERJ jet that had only 50 seats with the left hand side only have 1 seat in each row and the right side having 2. It was pretty cozy in there. But the flight was only half full so again no problem and 2 hours later I was in Toluca. 30Min later I was out of the plane and on my way to Valle after having spent $59 on the taxi. The Taxi driver took me on the auto route which only meant that 1hr 10 min later I was in Valle, getting here around 1:00pm. Pretty good.

Now comes the funny part.  Claudia had given me a google map with the location and picture of the apartment so I didn’t think there would be any problem finding it. Wrong!. The taxi driver took me to the Rancho San Bernadino rd which was well marked and at the end was a locked gate to the ranch. 2 ranch hands came over and started speaking to the Taxi driver. Basically they said there was no apartment on the ranch and asked for the location we were trying to find. The look on their faces as they tried to figure out the location of the building from an ariel view on google was pretty funny. Meanwhile in the background the ranch hands dogs (3 of them ) were getting growled and barked at by 3 other dogs in a neighbors back yard and a dog fight soon ensued! After breaking that up I also in the interm period failed to find the pictures of the apartment on my computer so things were looking grim and the taxi driver was getting a little frustrated too. However, to my amazement, a car pulls up and in it is an English woman called Sharma who speaks Spanish, knows Claudia and gets things sorted out pretty quick. I had earlier tried to contact Claudia but to no avail. Turns out her cell phone was stolen 2 weeks earlier so if it wasn't for Sharma I may have still been wandering around Mesa de Jaimes looking for the apartment. Claudia drove up from town to me me and get into the apartment,

 

The apartment is pretty basic but large and for the deal I got it is great. Sorry John! ;-) I dropped off my gear and headed down to town to meet her husband. Turns out Miguel is the owner of Alas des Hombres, one of the local flying schools but by far the longest one around. We went for lunch and I heard some good stories about the earlier days of NW Paragliders like Dixon White and Marc Chirico coming down here to fly. In the early days it was mainly hang gliders but paragliders eventually took over in mass.

After lunch I went back to the apartment, showered , shaved and went to town for dinner and met briefly up with the boys ( Arun, Dave, Frank, Stefan and Greg Baboosh was there for a short time too). Looks like best bet for me tomorrow is just to get a taxi ride up the El Penon and launch rather than go to town and get the shuttle. Will just be as cheap. So tomorrow at 10:00am I plan to be on launch getting ready for first flight this year! Tomorrow I will take the head cam and try and get some HD video footage to post.

Stay Tuned!