Michael Ash writes
Most people probably know where their local airport is and have
some idea of how to procure an airplane ride if they felt like it, but how
many people know where their nearest glider operation is located? How many
realize that they could start learning as early as the next weekend and
they could be flying solo in just a couple dozen flights?

I've lived within spitting distance of two glider clubs for about
fifteen years, was vaguely aware of one of them and oblivious to the
presence of the other until I finally decided the day had come for me to
do something about a life-long ambition of learning to glide and went
looking for the options.

I was shocked at how comparatively little it cost financially against
what I'd expected, and quite just how welcoming the club I joined turned
out to be towards newcomers like me. I was somewhat remorseful that I
hadn't realised this years ago. Had I done so, I'd have learnt to soar
in my late teens and early twenties, rather than trying to do so in my
mid thirties with all the other competing demands and responsibilities
that life at this point seems to bring.

I solo'd, got my bronze. Loved every second of it.

I'm not flying at the moment and missing it like hell, especially now
the sky has started popping with Cu and the new soaring season has
started. But it was time, not money that's put my soaring on hold for
the moment.

I have a couple of boys, aged seven and twelve respectively. Soaring is
something of a solo pursuit and one that absorbs whole days at the
weekend, and a gliding field is not a place for young kids, however
accommodating the club or friends and associates at the club might try
to be.

So for the minute, we've switched to sailing dinghies on a local pond,
and the boys laugh at me every time they catch me staring wistfully at
the sky and not paying attention to where I'm pointing the boat.

I guess my long-winded point is that whilst I agree with something a
previous poster wrote, people that want to glide find gliding, gliding
doesn't find them, I can't help but think that had gliding been just a
little more visible to me all those years back gliding would have had a
good few years out of me before I had my family instead of now having to
wait until my family grows up enough to let their dad back out to play
with the gliders again!

Even when there's a predisposition to the adventure of learning to fly,
aviation just doesn't figure into the everyday life of the everyday
bloke on the street. It's a completely different and quite alien world
to the uninitiated.

--
Bill Gribble
http://www.harlequin.uk.net
http://www.scapegoatsanon.demon.co.uk
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" - Emerson