Motorbikes and the Dordogne

A French picnic at Casillonenes

We had met Phillipe at a couple of the airfields in the area and he had invited us to a picnic at his home airfield of Castillonnes (LF4722) on the 20th of June. The map above shows that it is not far from our home airfield (top of the black line). The route took us underneath the class D airspace for Bergerac airport.

A view over my shoulder of us about to take off from our field at Cendrieux, looking north.
After about 30 minutes of gentle flying at around 2000 feet, we spotted our destination ahead.
Jude had made sandwiches, but we were told that we could not eat them as a French picnic was proper food.
Our host Phillipe had never flown in a weightshift microlight, so I put him into the back for a flight.
The take off shows what 100 bhp can climb like in a modern machine, Pillipe liked it!
After 14 minutes we were back for a short (30 meter) landing.
I was then offered the chance to pilot the club 3 axis microlight, known as a Hurricane.
We were soon into the air. Not as fast as mine or as much fun, but a flying experience anyway.
We returned after about 20 minutes flying. It was a very nice little machine to fly, but I would not like to go back to a 65 bhp two stroke engine.

For the picnic about 30 people turned up and we sat at the long tables in one of the pictures above. The French are experts at good food and very welcoming people. Everybody had brought food to share, bread, home made pate, tomatoes, cucumber, sausages, cakes, and many more things, they were nearly all home made. The red wine flowed freely, but I stuck to water as I knew that I had to return to our airfield later.

We had a fantastic day.
I hope that this post satisfies those of you who have emailed me asking where the next post is!

posted by madman @ 9:41 pm