We move up to Laragne on Tuesday. Here is the view from our bedroom window in Grasse:

James-Donald Carslaw <<email>> writes:

Have you noticed how green it is here? It's been unusually cold and wet for a month and the flying has been rubbish.

So far we've had sunny mornings with cumulus forming in the later part of the morning bringing small amounts of rain. I can imagine that it is wetter further up north into the mountains. I have been hearing that it has been wet for quite a while in Laragne and there was flooding in the Alps after the early bit of great cross country weather. Looks like the weather in Greifenburg sucks.

Here is what Robin Hamilton, who is in Houston writes, about the weather in Texas:

Rick Walker in Zapata wrote: Winds out of south east 10-15 knots. 101 degres, hot.

Stop! Its been difficult enough looking out my office window the last couple of days, also knowing that I have to get on a plane on Saturday to go to France for the pre-Worlds, where the outlook for the next week is rain, overcast and a max of 73 degrees. What's wrong with this picture?

Dustin Martin was very helpful when it came short packing the Wills Wing T2C 144 that I took with me to Europe, making sure that I was very thorough with the padding job. He had me purchase eight camping pads from Wal-Mart ($5.88/each), which we used for padding everything. The carbon outboard leading edges (with their attached sprogs) where completely wrapped in the blue foam.

The bottom ends of the down tubes (wrapped in blue foam), cross tube/leading edge junctions (bubble wrap), outboard ends of the inboard leading edges (two layers of blue foam), ends of the inboard sprogs (bubble wrap), and top of the cross bar junction (two layers of blue foam) were thickly padded. The Mylar and carbon/Kevlar inserts were taken out of the leading edges. The Mylar was wrapped around the ends of the down tubes. The carbon inserts laid on top of the glider.

The glider was strapped tight and then the glider bag was put back on it. Double thick pads were then wrapped around both ends of the glider. The foam pads (one thickness, about 1/2") were then wrapped longitudinally around the glider and strapped in place with 2" wide straps. The whole concoction was stored inside a thick bag made for me by Mitch McAleer at Wills Wing. He kindly put wheels at one end which did allow me to handle the glider by myself if I raised one end high above my head.

TSA opened the bags (we indicated where the zipper was), undid straps, opened the interior glider bag, left it unzipped, and just sort of put the whole thing back together, slightly. Still it looked like it made it okay. I'll know more next week after I get to Laragne and pull everything out and and inspect it.

I had thought that I needed to get the bag below 70 pounds. Not true. I carried the base bar separate, but if I had wrapped the ends up I could have placed it in the bag also. I'll do that for the trip home.