We had planned to set off on a Tuesday to give us a bad weather day en route and ensure we reached Teneriffe South by 5 pm local time on the Saturday when we meet up with our Inntravel walking tour. However, with very settled weather over Western Europe and still a few chores to finish off at home, the bad weather day would not be needed so we decided to postpone departure until Wednesday.
The day dawned bright and our route at FL110 took us south to Compton VOR, Southampton, across to Jersey then south to Nantes, La Rochelle and Bordeaux before turning SSE for Tarbes. I choose Tarbes in the foot hills of the Pyrenees as I had been there in December for a test flight in the Daher Socata TBM900 and thought it would be fun to go there again and show Miranda something of the city. We landed in the late afternoon, refuelled and then went to the hotel I stayed in last time, where we found we had been upgraded! Then out to the little restaurant where we had dined in December with the Daher Socata people looking after us.
Carlisle to Tarbes: 784 nm in 5 hours 35 min