I'm determined to get this out before I crash, so here goes.
Day 4 – Wednesday August 5th
Today’s update will be a bit shorter as it was largely a repeat of yesterday. We woke up early and were on the road as a caravan of 6 vehicles out to the practice site. The 6th was driven by long time French Team manager Jean Paul Delteil who has been a long time friend of Jason and Bryan and spent the day at the practice site with us.
Today was by far the nicest practice day, upper 80’s with very light winds and clear skies. The practice is getting a little bit more intense as the contest draws closer with each flight being critically scrutinized by the entire team. At this point everyone is flying extremely well and we’re only making small adjustments to presentation and focusing on consistency. We had one minor issue when the generator that the local club loaned us went on the fritz, but our local host Michael Bucher was quick to our rescue dropping off another generator during his lunch break. I can’t say enough about the hospitality that Michael and other local club members have shown us, and this was WAY above and beyond the call of duty. But it was greatly appreciated, especially by Joseph who is working with only a 3 battery rotation.
We’re getting more comfortable with our surroundings and are starting to explore a little bit more. After flying today Darin and I ventured out to the small town to our west to find a local hobby shop. It’s always interesting to see the products that stores carry and how our hobby is presented in other countries. This particular shop was a bit of a throwback to US shops prior to mail order and online shopping. It was a combination toy store and hobby shop with only about 20% of the retail space dedicated to RC Modeling, and mostly helicopters at that. None of the shop keepers spoke any English, but as I discovered in South Africa, “airplanes” are a unique language unto themselves and we were able to communicate surprising well who we were and why we were in town.
Dinner tonight was at a small pizzeria next to the hotel (both good and reasonable…reasonable being 25CHF/person or about $27) and then everyone was off to charge batteries and prepare for tomorrow.
Tomorrow will be the first real activities of the competition as I will be going to the main site to officially register the team. Friday is our official practice day on site (each pilot gets one practice flight at the contest venue) and then we will have processing where each model is inspected, weighed and noise tested prior to the competition.
The rest of our supporters (Tim and Linda Jesky, Cindy and Mike Wickizer and Jessy Symms) will be traveling tomorrow and arriving early Friday morning, so this will likely be the last update until Cindy gets set up here in Switzerland. By then we’ll have a feel for how some of the competition is flying and will have had the opportunity to explore the competition site. Until then…
Mark
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As Mark said, if all goes well we'll be up in the air headed out of Atlanta to Zurich tomorrow. I'm hoping our flight from Houston to Atlanta is running on time because we'll only have a 45 minute layover to make our flight to Zurich. If not, we may end up like Brett and Bryan and spend the night in Atlanta waiting for the next day's flight out. Let's hope not.
See you on the other end!
Cindy