Not until we’d parked and got out did we realise how hot the day had become. Sod’s Law meant that to pay the landing and fuel fees we had to climb to the top of the control tower four floors, each hotter than the previous one until we opened the door to the greenhouse at the top to find – air conditioning. Phew.

After a brief stop at the airfield café we were keen to get away on the last leg  of the trip as we could see towering thunderhead clouds developing in the distance, but fortunately not in the direction we were heading.

Bremgarten is situated on the flood plain of the Rhine valley but a few miles to the east the ground rises rapidly. We had to climb quite hard after take-off to gain altitude before we reached the rising ground and with the high ambient temperatures I was expecting the engine would be working very hard. In the event it took it in its stride and we were soon at 5000ft and back cruising in the cooler air. As we progressed on track we seemed to be following a line of escarpments dotted with glider airfields. Gliding has always been popular in Germany right back to the pioneering days of Otto Lilienthal and on this sunny Sunday it seemed as if half of
Germany was aloft in gliders as we were often having to dodge and deviate from our route to keep clear of them.

There were two features which we began to see more and more frequently from this point on; the first was wind farms, sometimes just singly or in pairs but often row upon row of them. Between one pair we flew over was a crop field on which had been mown a detailed map of Germany – or maybe the aliens with their crop circles have progressed to cartography now…

The other feature was the number of castles (Schloss) of fairy-tale character (or maybe Harry Potter style, to be more contemporary), which always seemed to be built in the most inaccessible locations, often perched on the very top of a rocky pinnacle or sometimes apparently clinging to the edge of a wall of rock.