"Caravan" to Africa

Valencia, Spain

After a short night of sleep in Santa Maria, we took a walk down the street from our hotel to have a look around. House have white stucco walls and red tile roofs in a Mediterranean style. Roads and sidewalks are made of cobblestone, with mosaic designs inlaid in the sidewalks. We visited a small cafe for some expresso, and the public library for internet access, then took a taxi back to the airport. The wind was picking up and it started to rain because of a thunderstorm coming in from the southwest, but the way we were going the weather was fine. This was an easier and more routine flight - we had another 800 nautical miles of ocean to cross, and then 400 of the Iberian peninsula, to reach Valencia. Most of the ocean crossing was in smooth air under clear skies, in daylight, but the sun went down while we were still well out over the sea. The shortness of our winter days is made worse while flying east because each such day of flying crosses several time zones, and each zone crossed subtracts an hour from our available daylight. But we did enjoy the sunset.

Here´s Mike enjoying his turn at riding in the back...



..and here´s a photo he took of the sun setting behind us.



I flight-planned a route across Portugal and Spain, but ATC assigned us an alternative route - from the open ocean straight through the strait of Gibraltar. Here the GPS map shows us headed in that direction.



This gave us our first view of Africa earlier than expected. Passing through the strait we had the city of Tangier, Morocco under our right wing, and Gibraltar with its famous "rock" under the left. The whole area is brightly lit at night, and it was fun to see, but did not photograph well with the digital camera. Chad is still counting ships, but I think he lost count there in the strait: there were lots of them coming and going between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. East of Gibraltar we turned northeast and crossed the south coast of Spain, finally flying over solid land again, after crossing a lot of water. It was a clear night, offering us views of stars above and city lights and vehicles below. There are some mountains in southeast Spain reaching up to 11,000 ft.. We flew northeast well to the west of those, although we could see them silhouetted against stars. We're now in Valencia on the east (Mediterranean) coast of Spain and hoping to fly to Crete tomorrow. I remembered to bring the camera from the plane today, and added a few pix to yesterday´s entry. Posted by Barry at December 18, 2003 07:54 PM