So, how to solve this? Well, the provider had a nice option: upgrade to a Virtual Private Server… Nice… but that’s far more expensive. After some feedback from a friend (thanks Simon!), I found another provider that delivers a good VPS option that even I can afford.

So, here we are. Up and running again on another server; moved from the US to Germany. I hope this runs fine for a while, since I don’t want to make moving websites around my next hobby

Enjoy reading!

For now I have disabled the Google maps which solves some of the issues. However, you will find that the photos of my Australia trip may or may not show.

I’m working on it, but this will take a few weeks…

For the other pilots, most of the afternoon is spend on paperwork; once that’s done, we drive to Orlando to our last hotel of this tour: Sheraton Orlando Downtown Hotel. After a nice dinner, we are going for a last beer and then it’s time to prepare for the flight home.

It’s been a nice holiday with a great group. We’ve seen a lot and been to great places. My personal highlights: the night out in Nashville, visiting Chicago and New York.

Here’s the group of this year’s Flying Adventure (from left to right): Jeroen van Rossum, Kees Schoorl, Egon Harteman, Ferdinand de Wit, Lex Versteeg, Addie Janssen, Tom Rompelman.

And this is the actual track that I’ve flown:

Today we are just doing 3 states: South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. During the first track of the day, we are overflying some lakes with particular shapes.

At Waycross-Ware County Airport, we run into a rather strange helicopter. A bit of research shows that this is a Kaman K-MAX. The interesting things about this helicopter are the two rotors that turn in opposite directions. This results in high stability which is very useful for firefighting. And that’s exactly what it is used for here; there are a lot of fires in this area and since this is mainly swamp, you can’t get to the fires by truck. When leaving the area, we are flying through the smoke of several fires.

During lunch we come to the conclusion that it is not realistic to fly to Kissimmee today; we’re running out of daylight and are not allowed to fly at night. After a bit of brainstorming, we decide to fly to Ormond Beach, which is close to Daytona Beach. We end up in the Daytona Beach Resort which with these views

After a nice dinner, some of the group goes out for some drinks, but after all the late nights that we had; my energy level is too low to join them… I must be getting old ;-(

Then it was time to take off. It’s really beautiful scenery.

After a bit of flying, we got to Edenton North Carolina. Once you cross the state line, you’ll notice the difference. How Y’all doing? Y’all come on in. We find three guys running the airport’s FBO. They’re very friendly and have a strong political opinion: let’s get rid of Obama as soon as possible…

Just before we left, we saw a blimp flying over the airport. It seems that this ship is used by the army and they are test driving it here.

After two more stop overs we ended the day in Clemson; world famous because of the Clemson Paws and the color orange… Well you must have been here to understand it; fly here, visit town at night; like we did…

And finally I’ve got a few pictures of “the Lady”.

Then it was time to fly to the south along the so called Jersey Shore.

This is swamp land and it amazes me why somebody would want to live here.

The further south, the hotter it gets. When we started today, the temperature was about 21 degrees. By the time we got to Cape May, we were way over the 30 degrees. It’s remarkable cooler in the shade though. After another great American lunch (aka hamburger), we moved on.

One of the next stops was quite interesting: Tangier. It’s a small island with only about 600 people living there.

We ended our tour today in Williamsburg. On route to our hotel, we saw some amazing houses along the route; hence why visitors come here to walk and get a feel of history.

Unfortunately, we were too late to get to the Statute of Liberty. After a day of walking around, we had a nice dinner at the Rockefeller plaza. Tomorrow we’ll move on again.

After the show, we still had some flying to do, since we want to end up in New York today. We were in a hurry now, since we are going to run out of daylight pretty soon. Looking at the distance we should be able to make it. Along the route we saw the results of the flooding a few weeks back.

From a planning point of view, this is interesting: we are going to fly to New York over the Hudson river along ground zero on 11 September 2011; ten years after…
Since we took of quite late, it was getting darker by the minute. As a result the pictures that I took from flying down the Hudson are horrible…

After some last glimpse at Chicago it was time to move on.

After days of flying, some of the guys were getting into a bit of a strange mode. One even started cleaning his plane. I’m starting to get worried…

Eventually we got to Niagara Falls by the end of the day. After a quick refresh, we got on the bus to see the falls by night. Well, it’s a lot of water dropping over an edge… You should go to the Canadian side to really have a decent view on the falls, but we didn’t do so. There was a band playing and beer on sale…

And since windows get dirty, they need to be cleaned by brave men…

After the boat tour we walked around and enjoyed the views. It’s a big city, but it’s easy to get to places. As with any big city with tall buildings, there’s always one that has an option to go to the top floor to have a good view on the city. So does Chicago. And this building has a nice feature: you can stand in a glass box that extends out of the building. Have a look at Lex and Egon here; Egon really does not like hights, so the only way to get him in the box is to have him look up…

After a day walking around, we ended up in an Italian restaurant; we ordered “small pizza’s”, but even that was way too much to eat. The left overs (at least two full pizzas) were nicely put in a doggy bag and we handed them over to some of the homeless people on the street.

That’s it for today. The general impression: Chicago is a nice city and for sure worth while visiting. I may come back to this place in the future.