Autopilot

Back from my not-even-24-hours-trip to Germany. The contract for my project has been signed on Thursday, few minutes before midnight, so there's no turning back: I'll be moving to France end of February! Seeing the first 3D-models of the power plant and pictures of the surrounding of the construction site took a great bit of the uncertainty away - only to be replaced by panic! When I get there I'll have to arrange so many things - negotiating contracts with real estate agencies, car-rental companies, catering... and set up the whole administration. AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!
Will HAVE TO start to work on my french, seeing that it will be a one-woman-show for the first few weeks, so there's nobody to help me out with that :-( But enough about work.

I made my first ryanair experience. Since all the airlines have been cutting down on their service level, there was no big difference. Something that was different though, compared to my other Spain-Germany trips, were the weather conditions. It was one hell of a bumpy ride and finally the recommendation of having your seat belt fastened during the whole flight made sense to me. The best part was the captain announcing that the weather-conditions at Frankfurt-Hahn were too bad to proceed with a manual landing procedure (clouds only 40 meters above ground - didn't know that was possible - and fog with 20m visibility max) and therefore flight security regulations instruct an autopilot landing. WTF??? He explained quite a bit about which parts of the landing would be regulated by the autopilot, but I didn't bother listening. In general I like to have as much information as possible to decide myself which parts are significant and which are a waste of brain capacity, but when it comes to flying I couldn't care less! I get on the plane, I get off the plane. You guys do the rest. Period! Ignorance is bliss, especially in this case. As you can conclude from me making a post, I survived ...even though I had my doubts every now and then ;-)

The 2nd autopilot experience of the day was picking up the rental car - the airport is appr. 130km from Offenbach, so I needed a ride. I developed a strategy for getting a nice car from Sixt - you just book a navigation system as additional feature. Seems like they don't have any for the economy class, which equals a VW Golf, so once again I was hooked up with a BMW 320i :-) WRRROOOMMMMM!!!! However, the navigation still has its flaws, seeing it led me into 3! dead end roads before I decided to switch it off, get near a highway and then switch it on again.
The flight back was shit as well, but it held a nice surprise in store: I met a couple of Frenchies that were not too bad ...actually quite nice! Must be the first time I met French guys that seemed likable. Could it be that there's hope after all?!? Maybe there's a light at the end of this tunnel that isn't a train.