Skånes Fagerhult a little piece of paradise.

Rosi relaxing while Julian plays with a fishing rod, note bbq in foreground

I found this airfield from the ffplume French document about travelling by ultralight in Europe and it is a little gem.  I have linked to the Belgian page on which I originally found this document, as they have many other useful suggestions on their website.

The airfield's owner, Bo, has built a log cabin which you can hire by the night, with kitchen, bathrooms, washing machine and most importantly, sauna. The airstrip is on a lake (overshoot the 550m runway and you'll be in it!) and you can watch the lake, your plane and the spotty Indian ponies grazing by the lake from the dining table. Being Sweden it is surrounded by light birch forest.

The lake, ponies hiding

Naturally we had to cycle around the lake system (bike hire included in the hut price) and then Cris heard about 10kg pikes living inthe depths of the lake, so he was off on a mission to find hooks for the fishing rods so he could row the boat out and catch the big one for our dinner...  Well the big one ended up being 4 tiddlers who had to be thrown back, but I think fishing is more about the expectation than the actual result.

View out on the lake from the dining table

Love those Swedish tea light holders

That evening Bo came around with his 10 year old daughter, Amanda, to give us a go on his old farm machinery...  He has 500 ton of machinery, mostly acquired as scrap, which he has brought back into working condition. Every child's dream came true as we used the digger to move a mound of earth into a tip truck, lowered a giant pencil suspended from the pail of another digger into various buckets in a time trial and drove the steam roller.....

Julian learning to use the digger

Amanda was of course better and faster than us, but a good time was had by all.  So if you're thinking of flying from Southern Sweden to Stockholm, can I heartily recommend a stopover at Skaanes Fagerhult as a peaceful way of spending an evening or several?

Hello again Höganäs

We wanted to take Cris and Rosi to places we knew would work well, so one of our first ideas was naturally Höganäs. It's a great grass runway, close to town, on the spectacular Kullaberg peninsula. When you add in that it's only a 30min flight from Copenhagen, which routes you over the Danish royal summer palace and UNESCO listed Helsingør fortress, how can you go wrong?

Höganäs as a club has the policy to be open and welcoming to visitors and the warmth of the welcome is another good reason to visit. In summer they have their 'flying fish' (flygfisk) meetings on a Tuesday night where people from all over Sweden, Denmark and even Germany come for their special baked herring.  As usual we were a bit too early, so had to content ourselves with going to the local fish smokery and getting the secret recipe for the fish.

We borrowed bicycles for Cris and Rosi from the club (a very reasonable 20 SEK each), which worked perfectly for cycling all around Höganäs on the day we arrived and the following day for Mölle harbour (a very beautiful little fishing village) and then up to the point of the Kullaberg. I was very reassured by Olle's incredibly kind offer to come and pick us up if we had any problems though!

The next day was time to say some fond farewells though. Thank you Höganäs air club, we had a fantastic time and hope that some of your members will look us up in Australia.

Moelle harbour from the high road

Our lunch spot at the communal fish smoker

Krapperup castle

Lunch flight to Dragsholm Slot

We read a review of this restaurant in the paper in Australia and figured that Cris and Rosi's visit warranted going to a nice restaurant. So we found the nearest airfield (Kalundborg) and landed. Who would have thought how difficult it could be to get a taxi in the country. Luckily Micheal an ex-Danish jet pilot gave us a lift and told us a little about working for the Danish air force and working as a trainer in Texas, which was a fascinating counterpoint to Wolf's experiences in the DDR.

Kalundborg airfield's art

The castle was lovely, as was lunch. We ate in the bistro eatery rather than the gourmet restaurant and had the 3 course set menu. The food was very good, though I had expected more herbs and fresh vegetables in spring. Several of the dishes used a really dry, crumbled chocolate biscuit as an ingredient, which worked surprisingly well.

After lunch the retaurant manager very kindly gave s a tour of the castle, including the bones of a teenage girl who was bricked into a wall for an inappropriate pregnancy by her father. Cris took photographs behind himself as we walked away, but her ghost was not to be seen. We then digested for a while in the rhododendron garden and snacked on a few wild garlic leaves.

Starter of cured salmon, radish and cucumber from the garden, microherbs, wild garlic cheese and toasted breadcrumbs, yum

Dessert of caramel with meringue, crunchy oaty stuff, crunchy chocolate biscuity stuff, sanddorn which have a great acidity to offset the sweetness, and a yoghurt sorbet.  Sorry, too busy eating the main of shredded veal on mashed potato with chocolate crumbs and beetroot to photograph.  According to the very helpful staff we really should go back for a dinner at the gourmet restaurant and this taste of what they can do really tempts me....

Relaxing in Roskilde and environs

Cris and Rosi joined us as part of their European tour for a week, starting in Roskilde. No it wasn't festival time. Roskilde was the centre of the Danish empire and where Danish kings and queens were buried for centuries.
So we had a look at the cathedral, the Viking boat museum, which is really great, back around 900 the inhabitants sunk nine ships to act as a barrier to sea borne marauders. These ships were then refound in the late 60s and have been researched and reconstructed ever since.

Viking ship museum

The team with a viking ship

Cris with viking ship, note stones used for ballast

Valbekomme: picnic lunch beside the cathedral

Our last night staying in the very kind Roskilde Flyveklub's bunkhouse on the airfield was the double trouble of club meeting and day before a public holiday (=prayer day) and also first meeting of the season. So we had a good chat with the members who passed on some good airfield recommendations, ate the special prayer day buns with butter, drank the coffee and then drank a nice glass of Chateauneuf at the flag hoisting.

Roskilde is a major airport, but we met with a very warm welcome.

I made Rosi try a traditional danish icecream: 2 balls with guf (the pink stuff, which is like strawberry flavoured meringue mix) and a floedeboll, which is like a Schaumkuss (sorry can't remember correct PC name for them) or remotely related to the Australian snowball - uncooked fluffy stuff in the middle, a wafer base and chocolate on top.

Ju and Rosi outside a traditional thatched roofed house seen on our Roskilde fjord ride.

Off to Soderslatts Vellinge for Malmö and farewelling Cris and Rosi

It was a wet and blustery morning that Julian and Cris took off as the first load going south, braving the at times 70 knot winds. Rosi and I stayed behind to clean, drink tea and go for a walk along the lake. Tough, but someone had to do it!
In the afternoon, when we'd all unpacked in our field near Malmö and after having iur 3pm late lunch, we strolled down the runway between the canola fields to walk along the foreshore (and eventually get abus to Trelleborg, as the seaweed smelt rather intense). Trelleborg is a great compact little town, with massive ferries coming regularly over from Denmark. In half an hour we had seen the major sights, including a fountain of a mermaid riding a snake-dragon (!) and were ready to hit up the supermarkets for dinner. With great talent Julian an Cris managed to get all we needed and meet the last bus (6.45pm).
Sweet.
The next day we wanted to do the 30km into Malmö, but decided (wisely as it turned out) that the hire bikes from the aerclub might not make the distance. Instead we cycled onto the big sand peninsula at the souh west corner of Sweden, which has long been the location of the holiday houses of the rich Stockholmites. There is a very impressive canal across the base of this peninsula. The bike paths out there are really good and the area is worth a look. Unfortunately not long after we'd turned back the bearings fell out of the crank in Cris' hire bike, rendering it unpedallable, so the boys ended up finding some rope and Julian towed Cris the 17kms home. It was a very windy day and a lot of that was with headwind....
Then a 10 year old on a bicycle managed to shoot out from behind a hedge and I didn't manage to take timely evasive action. Sigh. So now my bike has a broken gear lever which I hope to have fixed in Berlin in 5 weeks, as it's the first place we'll be in long enough for a repair...
Crisand Rosi managed to catch a variety of busses to make it to Copenhagen airport for their onward journey to Amsterdam, so all went well.

Peenemünde rocket museum

Is on the island of Usedom fairly directly north of Berlin. The facility was built by the Nazis and looks it. Being the ex-East however it has a more detached view of the past.
It also has a great exhibiton about Russian space exploration, which was both before my time and not so well reported in the west, so an interesting glimpse into the past.
Also an extra photo of the wild boar in Jungfernheide, so cute!

Jam ideas from Silke in Neu Brandenburg

My favourite: apple juice infused with elderflower jelly.  (Silke gave me a jar, but it's all long gone 29/5)
Pumpkin and apple.
Elderberry orange and vanilla.
Zucchini and vanilla.
Yum.

Orienteering of the air in Neu Brandenburg

The joint military / civil airstrip of Neu Brandenburg

We were really happy when we discovered that there was an air rally in Neu Brandenburg on the weekend of the 9 - 12 May, right on our way to Denmark.
So naturally we asked whether we could camp on the airfield, which caused considerable consternation, it being a shared military / commercial air transport airfield.
Anyway everything ended up working out much better than just camping: Wolf a former DDR Mig pilot invited us to stay with him and his lovely wife, Silke.

This was not just a great opportunity to get to know some really lovely people, it had the added benefit (for us) of giving us an insight into the military and the DDR.
We felt a little unprepared for the competition, as we didn't have all the necessary equipment to do the course calculations etc., luckily we chose to join the tourist class! Next time we'll join the real competition. Though I don't know that I like our chances against all the ex-fighter and commercial pilots.

Precision landing box

 Anyway an excellent time was had by all, and we met a lot of interesting pilots at the gala dinner who had travelled to all sorts of places and gave us some good tips on travelling to the relatively uncharted East...
Did I mention that we won our class, I was so pleased!

Julian getting ready to test ride Wolf's 50s Czech motorbike...

Eggersdorf: GDR military 'replacement' runway

We went for a little afternoon flight with Clare and Guntram to the next airfield to Strausberg, Eggersdorf. Dirk on the tower took us for a tour. It's a ridiculously long runway: 2340m of grass with rubble buried underneath so thay heavy transpprters could land there.  The reason for this is that the GDR built it as a replavement runway for the nearby military airfield in case that runway was damaged in times of war. Off the asphalt taxiway, which runs along the edge of a forest there are several little bays wherr migs would have been hidden, to launch from the taxiway.

Day flight from Berlin to Eberswalde Finow

68ha of solar cells, awesome MIG shelters, how cool is this place?

This isn't a really long trip from Berlin, but as usual the people are what made it great.  We landed on a 2540m asphalt runway thoughtfully provided by the Russians and weren't quite sure what to do.

Luckily after a short chat at the cafe next to our plane's parking spot, Matthias from the tower offered to give us a tour of thee airfield, with its three different types of MIG shelter, one of which now includes an apartment where the exhaust gas ducts once were.

We also scrambled on top of a shelter to assess the roof terrace potential. Fabulous. Each shelter cost the same as 10 DDR homes did, back in the day, and is now yours for only €30K. Bargain. The runway looks like soon being shortened  to 1000m as the 68ha solar array (we thought it was a lake when we were approaching it) is extended. We shall see.


Still to come, a photo of the famous boat lift in Finow.....

Onwards to Berlin - Strausberg review

We were quite sad to leave Bonn as we met so many fantastic people, but it was time.
The fueller gave us the tip that Strausberg  has the best public transport connection to Berlin, so off we went.
It felt like a fairly long trip so we were pleased to hit the ground and meet the friendly handler.
Strausberg is a great airport: a long tarmac runway only 700m from a Berlin train station, so very convenient if you don't have bikes. However it is a good 1.5h journey into town on trains that go twice an hour.
We ended up staying a night in their pilots rooms (€30 for a double), wjich were new and nice and with kitchen corner in the hall we could heat our frozen pizza from Aldi and chill our breakfast yoghurt overnight.
Landing and parking all were quite reasonable and the €5 we paid for hamdling was fantastic for their services in bringing our plane contents from our plane up into our first story room.



For the smaller pilots



Speed canards and carbon fibre bike parts.

Now you may have occasionally heard me talk about Speed Canards and how I am obsessed with the concept of rocket ship styled planes. So of course when we were tempted into the lovely VeloCity bike store in Bonn by the folding bikes in it's window display, it was completely natural that Franz who works there previously worked with them...

This experience has lead to his ongoing interest in carbon fibre bike parts and he has recently written a chapter of a book for bile mechanics on the topic.  He an his girlfriend Katrin were kind enough to invite us around for an exquisite dinner, which i shall now record here for posterity.

with Franz and Katrin

Smoked black pudding with a layer of creme fraiche and a layer of apples gratineed.
Kalbsroulade, veal roll with sage with local organic white asparagus which had a great flavour and potatoes.
Icecream with a special date, apple and pear reduced sauce from liege.
It's so nice meeting people with similar hobbies to myself.

Cycling south from Bonn to the spectacular Drachenfels

When we told the locals that we intended to cycle north to Cologne, they earnstly informed us that we would be much better off riding south long the Rhein, as it's one of the loveliest rides in Germany. Well I can't comment on that, but it was a truly stunning ride - many tree lined alleys and parks.
It's amazing how important hills are to making an attractive landscape, and putting castles on top of them does add to ther attractiveness, so we made sure we flew past the Drachenfels (dragon cliff) when we left Bonn.

To Cologne and back with our bikes*

Some of the sights along the way, as well as the famous cathedral.
* n.b. i didn't say we cycled all the way...

Lunching in the cathedral square

Cycling in to Cologne, just before we gave up and got the train :-)

Isn't this cathedral fantastic, the tower climb was probably the best I have done in terms of beauty of the building from the inside. And oddly enough about a year later I am still returning to climb it in my dreams.

Flying into Germany's red wine area, the Ahr (photos added)

Coming in on short final, the airfield was great and the people very kind

Sampling the local produce

We wanted to take a little weekend trip with Kerstin and Gerd, and what could be better than flying into their local wine region, the Ahr, Germany's premier red wine district?



Aren´t the handwritten menus great???

The maypole being hoisted, which turned out to be a long and difficult struggle

Very pretty little old town



Around the time of the hoisting of the Maypole

Kerstin & Gerd in a cute little diner

Nice castle with vinyards.

The vinyards were really quite steep