Filed for 0800Z tomorrow. Tracking link
So you made it. Nice flight I presume?
Yeah, made it.
A very easy flight of about 5hrs. A few pics:
A bit of fog around in the morning and tons of dew – the aircraft cover was totally soaked and I got soaked wrapping it up…
There was some high cloud near the route
but it moved over to the east just enough.
Shoreham should be pleased with their ex-Heathrow DME – this is from FL150
FL150 was just right in the early part of the flight (tops about FL140)
I got a shortcut to MAREN of about 260nm. The LFOB turned out to be spot on; I landed with 31.4 USG – enough to fly on to somewhere in Tunisia, at least.
Some of N France is quite interesting from the air 
(but not much)
The long sandy beach on the west coast, near Biarritz
Into Spain now
The Good and the Bad and the Ugly filming country, for sure – totally barren
A mystery runway, not on the Jepp VFR maps, shortly before LESA and to the left of my track
Short final in the ILS – they clear you to self intercept (no radar)
There is a radar dish there but is not rotating
There is an FTO here
A lot of firefighting aircraft
There was nobody about airside or in the building at all – except two policemen who had apparently waited 1.5hrs there for me to arrive, to look at my passport. ATC told me they are not responsible for the civilian side – basically told me to f-off. From some N European students (waiting to fly in a twin) I got a phone # for the ops man, who could not speak English… eventually he met me and with hand gestures I got avgas (€580 for 199 litres) and a taxi called. Taxi into town was €25.
A lot of great architecture, especially in the evening light
Route actually flown is in black:
The Saturday wx looks probably OK at the UK end. The cold front doesn’t seem too aggressive, so that’s the plan – 1030Z EOBT on Saturday. The Ops man gets there 8am local and I will apparently need 1hr to pay.
So, more pics tomorrow…
Almost nobody speaks any English and some cafes won’t even serve you.
It’s also hard to find “normal healthy” food here. Tons of pizzas, processed meat, and the usual crap (Domino’s Pizza). But I found some… There is a million cafes doing cafe snacks. Temperature is really nice at +23C daytime, but dropping fast at night.
At nearly 3000ft, LESA is probably my highest-elevation airport to date.
The flight was smooth except for some thermals near the end.
5-10kt headwind all the way, but I did a -100fpm descent the last 150nm which gave me an extra 10-15kt.
Salamanca is a fabulous place….I remember eating a very mean paella there…and the architecture is good, too, of course 
Pretty sure I recognise that bit of French estuary as my own flying playground! Just teeny bit further east and there I was …pottering along middle of downwind for 11. Me and a stude doing this year’s zillionth circuit …
Enjoy your trip, look forward to some more photos !
Some more pics, in the morning sunlight:
In the market square:
I found the shell palace mentioned previously but unless I got the wrong one it is a library
Is there an app (for Symbian ) which can do OCR and give you the English version?
(the obvious answer )
There is a ton of impressive architecture here. I am going to try to get inside one or two of the cathedrals next. Currently they are shut.
The temperature change is awesome, from +3C early morning to +23C or so. Salamanca has just gone past Gatwick
LESA 311000Z 16003KT 120V200 CAVOK 18/09 Q1023
EGKK 310950Z 17006KT 140V210 CAVOK 17/14 Q1018
but it’s clear where you would rather be tomorrow
LESA 310500Z 3106/0106 VRB04KT CAVOK TX25/3114Z TN04/3106Z
EGKK 310503Z 3106/0112 VRB03KT 5000 BR NSC PROB40 3106/3108 3000 MIFG BECMG 3109/3112 17010KT CAVOK PROB30 3112/3118 8000 BECMG 3118/3121 7000 TEMPO 0102/0112 -RA BKN012 PROB30 TEMPO 0106/0112 4000 RADZ BR BKN008
2.90 EUR per liter for avgas! F. me.
Like it or not, that’s pretty much the average price in Southern Europe nowadays. That includes Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.
Mind you, Holland, Finland and the Baltic countries are the same.
Better run that Mooney nicely LOP, at a moderate percent of power, and fly as high as possible to get good NMPG numbers…
I did the “double cathedral” this morning – Jeronimus. They ban flash photography but they didn’t reckon on modern DSLRs with 50000 ISO capable sensors. I am using the Pentax K3 for all this… no point in spending all that money on avgas and then using a less than best camera
The de rigueur level of suffering is correctly depicted
A nice roof – I’d hate to have to get a UK builder to fix that when it leaks
A lot of stairs to the top. They have a funny sort of timed traffic light system to make sure you don’t get people going up and down at the same time
Salamanca is a relatively small city and you can see the barren surroundings just outside
At the very top, they have mesh in the windows which one can’t quite get rid of in the photos
This is the very top
Here is the machine which generates their TAFs
The Spanish like their meat
The market square
Everybody here, even the scaffolding, goes for style
The bull ring at the northern end of the city. There is very little beyond there…
The hotel wifi is very very slow on uploads so I tried the wifi data connection from my phone which should be much faster – only to discover that Vodafone UK are blocking FTP data on the contract which I have with them. It works OK via a VPN. Bastards. These telcos must have teams of d1ckheads inventing new ways to shaft people. Voda already block VOIP on all contracts below 40 quid.
Tomorrow’s wx looks like it will pass through Shoreham sooner than expected so I will have to deal with the cold front while enroute, which is probably better
EGKK 311058Z 3112/0118 17010KT 9999 FEW040 BECMG 3118/3121 7000 TEMPO 0103/0110 -RA BKN012 PROB30 TEMPO 0105/0108 4000 RADZ BR BKN008 BECMG 0106/0109 24010KT BECMG 0109/0112 9999
Tomorrow’s tracking link – 1030 EOBT.
2.90 EUR per liter for avgas! F. me.
Still at least 10c cheaper than Aberdeen!
Great photos, thanks for sharing!
It’s a miracle FTP works properly most of the time – it’s a daft protocol which uses random ports for the data connection. A lot of routers can’t cope with this – especially when you’re NATted as you often are with cellular data. It probably wasn’t malicious.
