Flying lesson.

I had my first flying lesson today!
Last year Annemarie and the boys gave me a flying lesson as a birthday present. And somehow it took almost a year to 'cash it in' (actually we forgot all about it; the voucher has been on our kitchen notice board for almost 1 year.....) . But anyways, today was the day.

Annemarie and I left home early (7.45 am) for a two hours drive to Teuge Airport, near Apeldoorn. At 10.30 hours we took off in our small plane. Annemarie was sitting in the back, and I sat next to the pilot.

Of course I had my camera with me and had (for myself) decided I would rather take pictures than take over the control stick, but once we were up there at a height of 900 feet (300m), Michael (the pilot) asked me if I wanted to fly myself. So I did, I gave it a try.

I got the stick and at first nothing happened. I was told to keep the horizon straight and visible at a certain height. Then, slowly but surely the horizon was rising and we were descending. Time for some action.
I pulled the stick slowly towards me and that did the trick. After that we went left and right, an up and down again. Quite fun to do actually.

After a while I asked the pilot to take over again. I wanted to shoot some more photos. We flew over the city of Apeldoorn and the Royal Palace Paleis Het Loo as well. We had some beautiful views.
After our 30 minutes flight we landed safely on Teuge Airport again.
A great expericence!

The second part of the present was a visit to the Royal Palace Het Loo, the gardens and the Royal Stables.
The Palace itself was closed due to restoration (we knew that in advance, so no disapointments here), so we spent some time in the gardens and woods surrounding it. Because of the restoration we could visit the rooftops of the palace. A construcion lift took us up there. We had some spectacular views over the beautiful gardens.

Later in the afternoon we went to Deventer for a nice lunch, and we closed the day off back in Groningen, at DaCarlo pizzeria.

All and all we had a great day. Away from it all, for a while.