2004
I returned to England to my night shift. My employers were becoming aware that I was unhappy. They offered me more overtime. I did not want more time in the factory. I was seeking a way out. In the end, every day of the week was spent trying to sleep and every night was taken trying to work and earn more money to escape. The weekends were a nightmare of sleep deprivation and drinking. My employers decided that I should have the choice of weekend work to encourage me to stay. I took the overtime, but by now, I had only one wish; To go back to Spain. In England my options were looking grimmer every week, whereas Spain was the promised land; The stuff dreams are made of.
My bosses were grooming me to be a foreman on the nightshift. In my younger years I would have jumped at the chance. But now, apart from the distraction of Spain I felt that at my time of life I should be enjoying the open air. I had a lot of hobbies and so many things I wanted to do if only I had the spare time. If I followed their lead I would be committed to working nights for the next ten years. It would have been like a prison sentence, but I would have had money to burn.
I did not want to be the richest man in the graveyard. Some of my friends from my married years were already dead. I decided I wanted my freedom while I could still enjoy it.
During 2005 I took a holiday to Portugal. I had arranged to meet some estate agents to look at some houses they had for sale in Olvera. I drove to Olvera and met them in the morning. We looked at seven or eight houses that day. Most of them were nothing like I wanted. Too expensive, or in a bad state of repair. Some of them were derelicts requiring tens of thousands to renovate.
The last one I looked at was different. It was already lived in by a Spanish couple, who had two sons and a daughter. The estate agents wanted a silly price, which was beyond my means. So I declined. Within a week of returning to England I received a call from the owner of the house I had fancied. His price direct was better than all the others.
I accepted after pacing up and down my hall for an hour.
My early retirement was now within touching distance.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
My return to England and a holiday in France
Back to England
After my first flying holiday in Spain I went back to work, but was unhappy in my job. Permanent nights meant I had no social life. I was divorced, my children were all grown up and married. If I let my house in England I could buy a house in Spain and live there till I got my pension. The plan was beginning to form in my mind. I had become one of thousands who thought they could escape to paradise.
In 2003 I took a holiday to France to a place called Annecy. I had visited Annecy with my family in a motor home many years ago. I went back there several times on holiday and even took my little sailing dinghy once. I got a real buzz from sailing on the lake, but you had to be careful, because the winds could spring up and within half an hour you were sailing in choppy metre high waves and in real danger of a capsize.
This time I came back as a Paraglider pilot having taken a course in flying in the Yorkshire Dales in the intervening 22 years. I had about 50 hours flying time behind me by then and flying abroad was a big new challenge. I arrived in Annecy in late August just before the firework festival in the town. This is a really big event and people come from all over France to see it. The fireworks take up about an hour and you are very lucky if you can find a spot around the lake or on the hillsides to watch. Luckily, I was in a campsite above the lake and had a good view.
The lake at Annecy is a Mecca for hang gliders and Paragliders. It is surrounded by mountains which warm up in the sun and cause the air around them to rise. This is a well known phenomenon known to flyers and at a certain point in the day just after noon there is enough lift to take off. The real challenge was to fly right around the lake in the ascending air currents.
The beauty of Annecy was it´s convenience. There were half a dozen very good campsites around the lake.
There was a minibus every hour which would pick you up at the landing area and drive you to the take off point for 1€, and a cafe which served coffee or beer with a variety of cooked snacks. The downside was that half of the paragliders and hang gliders in Europe were forming a big queue waiting to take off every afternoon. Mess up your take off and you went to the back of the queue.
One day after taking off I had a tuck on the left hand side of the wing. A tuck is when the two layers of fabric of the wing loose their internal air pressure and the wing simply folds up. Usually you can pull the brake handle several times on that side and it will re-inflate. I tried everything to pull out this tuck, but it would not inflate. The tuck was causing so much drag that I could not turn to the right. Turning to the left was encouraging an asymmetric collapse of the wing and a spin. Try as I might I could not make the glider turn to the right. Left hand turns were all I had.
I flew out over the lake to escape from the lift and turbulence of the rising air currents, then gently let the glider drift to the left until I was heading for the landing area five km. away. I was sweating now because the landing strip at Annecy is quite small and it has a lot of traffic, both paragliders and hang gliders. I joined the stack of pilots waiting to land. They were doing nice tight circuits whilst I was meandering all over the sky trying to line up for a landing. Finally it was my turn to land and I lined myself up with the field. Everybody on the ground could see the tuck and knew I was struggling to maintain direction. The ground rose up to meet me and I pulled the brakes for a full flare landing three feet from the ground. When I flared to land the tuck popped out and re-inflated, just as my feet touched the grass. As my glider collapsed around me I was already on the second round of all known swear words. The triangular field below is the congested landing area. I am circling at the top of a stack waiting my turn to land.
After my first flying holiday in Spain I went back to work, but was unhappy in my job. Permanent nights meant I had no social life. I was divorced, my children were all grown up and married. If I let my house in England I could buy a house in Spain and live there till I got my pension. The plan was beginning to form in my mind. I had become one of thousands who thought they could escape to paradise.
In 2003 I took a holiday to France to a place called Annecy. I had visited Annecy with my family in a motor home many years ago. I went back there several times on holiday and even took my little sailing dinghy once. I got a real buzz from sailing on the lake, but you had to be careful, because the winds could spring up and within half an hour you were sailing in choppy metre high waves and in real danger of a capsize.
This time I came back as a Paraglider pilot having taken a course in flying in the Yorkshire Dales in the intervening 22 years. I had about 50 hours flying time behind me by then and flying abroad was a big new challenge. I arrived in Annecy in late August just before the firework festival in the town. This is a really big event and people come from all over France to see it. The fireworks take up about an hour and you are very lucky if you can find a spot around the lake or on the hillsides to watch. Luckily, I was in a campsite above the lake and had a good view.
The lake at Annecy is a Mecca for hang gliders and Paragliders. It is surrounded by mountains which warm up in the sun and cause the air around them to rise. This is a well known phenomenon known to flyers and at a certain point in the day just after noon there is enough lift to take off. The real challenge was to fly right around the lake in the ascending air currents.
The beauty of Annecy was it´s convenience. There were half a dozen very good campsites around the lake.
One day after taking off I had a tuck on the left hand side of the wing. A tuck is when the two layers of fabric of the wing loose their internal air pressure and the wing simply folds up. Usually you can pull the brake handle several times on that side and it will re-inflate. I tried everything to pull out this tuck, but it would not inflate. The tuck was causing so much drag that I could not turn to the right. Turning to the left was encouraging an asymmetric collapse of the wing and a spin. Try as I might I could not make the glider turn to the right. Left hand turns were all I had.
I flew out over the lake to escape from the lift and turbulence of the rising air currents, then gently let the glider drift to the left until I was heading for the landing area five km. away. I was sweating now because the landing strip at Annecy is quite small and it has a lot of traffic, both paragliders and hang gliders. I joined the stack of pilots waiting to land. They were doing nice tight circuits whilst I was meandering all over the sky trying to line up for a landing. Finally it was my turn to land and I lined myself up with the field. Everybody on the ground could see the tuck and knew I was struggling to maintain direction. The ground rose up to meet me and I pulled the brakes for a full flare landing three feet from the ground. When I flared to land the tuck popped out and re-inflated, just as my feet touched the grass. As my glider collapsed around me I was already on the second round of all known swear words. The triangular field below is the congested landing area. I am circling at the top of a stack waiting my turn to land.
My First visit to Spain
Take off at Lijar.
This is the take off at Lijar Poniente above Algodonales, where I had my first flying holiday in Spain. Lijar is a huge limestone hill with its highest point 1051metres above sea level. It is just outside the Natural Parque Sierra de Grazelema The land around Lijar averages around 400metres above sea level, giving you a no lift glide, (Called a top to bottom.) of 650metres. (2100ft.)
The take off area is quite small, making it quite congested in the peak flying periods. Paragliders in the early years were very tolerant and friendly people. Over the years more and more people have come here to fly, but some brought some of the worst manners in flying etiquette. For a number of years the flying sites were overbooked and gangs of pilots filled the take off areas, trampling over other peoples lines and canopies in an effort to take off first. Ignorance was the order of the day.
There are guide rules about how many gliders can safely fly over a given hill or ridge. At one site that I used to fly from there was a voluntary limit of 8 gliders flying at any one time. If one landed another could take off. On one day at this site I counted 15 gliders in the air and seven just about to take off. I never even took my glider out of the car. I and the other British pilots just went home. The Spanish pilots argued and there were near fights. I could sympathise with them, they had flown here for years. It was their country after all.
In the picture my glider has been pulled off the ground and is flying above my head. You have to kill it’s forward motion with the brake lines, otherwise it will fly in front of you and collapse on your head.
During this manoeuvre you have turned to face the wind and must now run like hell, whilst gently pulling the brake stirrups. If you are lucky, within a few strides you are lifted off the ground and you fly away from the hill. The upward moving air flowing over Lijar lifts you literally by the seat of your pants and you climb high above the take off area. This always gave me a big buzz.
Flying away from the hill there is a ploughed field two thousand feet below, which is where you aim to land if things go wrong, or you loose height and cannot make the landing field further to the north. My foot got in the picture because, to use the camera, I had to let go of the controls and use my body to turn the glider where I wanted it to go. This requires that you lean heavily to one side to turn. As a consequence your leg comes up as counterbalance.
The strange looking hill to the left of my foot, which seems to have a crest is actually a fold in the rock, which geologists call an anticline. This one is quite spectacular and can be seen close up on the road down to the pueblo of Coripe This is the little road you see in the valley bottom.
Introduction
As I understand it, a Blog is a day to day record of small, or big things that you have done, or are going to do. Full of photographs and little text.
I would like to do it differently, if I can.
I would like to start this blog ten years ago and tell you what I did starting in 2002 right up to today. I will skip blank periods because I want to share the adventures not the tedium. A lot of the events can only be described in words. Without the context of my thoughts, the pictures are meaningless.
To begin my little adventure, I must go back to 2002. After twenty seven years of marriage. I split up with my wife. I was a paraglider then in England and after the split I took my first flying holiday to Algodonales 15km. from Olvera. I returned four or five times on flying holidays over a period of two years at the end of which I had made up my mind to live here.
Olvera is nothing like the Costas. It has always been an agricultural village and is still very much the same as it was fifty years ago. Everybody has TV, internet and sometimes, top of the range cars, but the older end have seen some awful years, yet still treasure the way of life they have always lived. Many still cannot read or write.
Winter here in Olvera can be cold with occasional snow on the mountains. It’s views are amazing and ever changing, with the seasons. Summers are always hot and dry. Summertime is when the Spanish move onto the night shift. Walking around in the 40 degree heat of the afternoon is not to be recommended. Blinds are pulled down windows and doors shut, to keep out the furnace breezes from outside and a siesta is the norm. August afternoons in the Pueblo Blancos of Andalucia are like living in a ghost town. Close to midnight all the people come out and sit on their doorsteps chatting across the streets in the warm darkness. A cool breeze is a blessing.
When I finally did come to live in Olvera five years ago, I was amazed by the countryside. I began to explore the land around me. This blog will cover memories and photos of the people I met and the things I did and saw.
I would like to do it differently, if I can.
I would like to start this blog ten years ago and tell you what I did starting in 2002 right up to today. I will skip blank periods because I want to share the adventures not the tedium. A lot of the events can only be described in words. Without the context of my thoughts, the pictures are meaningless.
To begin my little adventure, I must go back to 2002. After twenty seven years of marriage. I split up with my wife. I was a paraglider then in England and after the split I took my first flying holiday to Algodonales 15km. from Olvera. I returned four or five times on flying holidays over a period of two years at the end of which I had made up my mind to live here.
Olvera is nothing like the Costas. It has always been an agricultural village and is still very much the same as it was fifty years ago. Everybody has TV, internet and sometimes, top of the range cars, but the older end have seen some awful years, yet still treasure the way of life they have always lived. Many still cannot read or write.
Winter here in Olvera can be cold with occasional snow on the mountains. It’s views are amazing and ever changing, with the seasons. Summers are always hot and dry. Summertime is when the Spanish move onto the night shift. Walking around in the 40 degree heat of the afternoon is not to be recommended. Blinds are pulled down windows and doors shut, to keep out the furnace breezes from outside and a siesta is the norm. August afternoons in the Pueblo Blancos of Andalucia are like living in a ghost town. Close to midnight all the people come out and sit on their doorsteps chatting across the streets in the warm darkness. A cool breeze is a blessing.
When I finally did come to live in Olvera five years ago, I was amazed by the countryside. I began to explore the land around me. This blog will cover memories and photos of the people I met and the things I did and saw.
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