Back from the Balkans...

Just reporting back from my 10 days Balkans tour.

It was a magnificent experience – being my first ever longer VFR touring trip after a good year of flying.

This forum and its members contributed a lot to this trip happening – both in terms of the specific advice and answers to my abundant questions during the trip planning and also by the generally inspring lecture of other members’ trip reports.

A detailed report will follow, but here’s some quick statements:

• Aircraft was a club C172 M with long-range tanks
• Our routing was EDLP Paderborn – LOLW Wels – LYBE Beograd – LDSB Bra? – LJLJ Ljubljana – EDFE Egelsbach – EDLP Paderborn.
• Total track made good: 1573 NM
• Total flight time: 16,6 hours
• The most record-breaking leg for me was LOLW Wels – LYBE Beograd: My longest flight in command (3:52h, 353 NM), with the highest altitude (10.754 ft), the most exotic destination aerodrome, the largest destination aerodrome and a crossing of the Eastern Alps.
• Despite marginal weather in the destination region upon departure (albeit with an optimistic outlook that turned out accurate), we were able to fly ALL legs as planned. For a multi-day VFR trip across Europe, I thought that’s worth mentioning. The only delay I experienced on the last leg after dropping off my friend in Frankfurt-Egelsbach: There were some gusting winds at EDFE in the morning on Saturday and low cloud and showers en-route to my final destination Paderborn, so I spent the afternoon at the airfield doing paperwork and flew back after things cleared up in the early evening.