Wednesday was destined to be a bit of a gourmet navigational treat.
The people involved were Gwen and her husband Bernard, myself and my new student Martin ; who had literally driven from England to find me without any prior notification.He was at the club,awaiting my arrival one day last week, with the request "please could you teach me to fly",having pitched his tent at the nearest campsite to the Aero Club de Limoges.
A week earlier at the club we had seen a poster offering a flight to Sarlat with a free taxi service for pilots wishing to have lunch at RESTAURANT DE L'ESPLANADE a superb restaurant in the medieval walled town of Domme, which is close to Sarlat airport situated in the beautiful Dordogne valley.
see photograph below from their website.
This was a "fly in " invitation and we expected lots of pilot's to be at the restaurant, what a treat!.
We had made all the necessary reservations the previous week, when the day dawned we arrived at the club and Gwen and Martin began their flight planning to Sarlat.
We obtained the weather, checked out the plane and the final task was to go to the pumps to refuel F-GMKT .All systems go!
As I walked towards the plane I stopped to say "Bonjour!" to the pilots of two aircraft parked nearby from the neighbouring club Aero Club de Limousin.
I asked them where they were going and they replied that they were flying to a restaurant on the airfield at "Sainte Foy La Grande". I said that we were going to Sarlat for lunch at Domme. Imagine my surprise when they told me " Oh we were going there but it has been cancelled and all the restaurants in Domme are closed on Wednesdays".
We were astonished and surprised that we had not received any notification of the cancellation.
Our neighbours kindly asked us to join them for lunch at Sainte Foy La Grande. Of course we readily agreed ,so we trooped back to our club to do a new flight plog for this destination.
The wind at ground level was about 8 knots but to our amazement we discovered the wind at height was extremely strong in excess of 40 knots at 2000 feet.
We took off and literally crawled to the destination in one hour twenty minutes ( in the large, fast, DR400/180 aircraft) and landed safely on the rather tricky up hill grass runway.The only other aircraft to be seen were the two Robins from Aero Club de Limousin.
We remarked how could they have a restaurant here without any obvious clientele. We wandered around for a few minutes everywhere was quiet and deserted ; was this Domme? we were delighted to find that Jardins d'Eole was actually a beautiful restaurant not just a basic airfield cafe.
In fact the restaurant was first class,the service excellent and the price was extremely reasonable, in fact only 23 euros per person for the three course lunch.
We discovered that the restaurant was open every day , however prior reservation is essential - what a find this place was, and just a few paces from our parked aircraft.
www.jardins-deole.com
A jolly time was had by all and then we were ready for the return supersonic flight back to Limoges.
This time Martin was in the left hand seat, with the wind behind us we streaked home with a ground speed of 145 knots.
Every dark cloud has a silver lining we had a wonderful day.
Many thanks to our fellow pilots from the Aero Club de Limousin for suggesting this destination.
We look forward to continuing our gastronomic tour of France
Prepare yourselves...... taste buds beware.
WATCH THIS SPACE FOR THE NEXT INSTALMENT!
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