Hello everyone!

Due to the lack of stable connection we haven’t really been able to use the site as much as we had hoped but guess what? As of today we are online and kicking with our brand new Cox Cable connection!

A lot of things has happened since my last blog but at least bertil kept you guys updated on our eventtrip to laguna seca by adding a brief little blog the night before we left!

So why not start there?

Laguna Seca, one of the most famous tracks when it comes to motorcycle racing! This is one of the tracks that you actually played on all them old videogames! It was really neat to get to see the track for real especially the famous “corkscrew” which has claimed many victims with it’s quick downhill left-right turn. Please check out the events section for some eye candy!

However from my part it wasn’t just the time spent at the track which was amazing but everything around it! Since all four of us have to do a longer cross country navigation including landing at at least three airports we managed to combine this into one superb weekend!!!

The adventure started at 0500hr, June 21st, when we got up and got all our stuff ready before we left for Gillespie (the airfield). At the school we made sure that our planes were fueled up on both gas and oil. We did our preflight (which is a check to see if the plane is fit for flight) and luckily everything seemed to be were it was supposed to. We joined up with Lars and Jonas, our teachers for the weekend, and briefed the flight before we finally started up the engins and started the 4.5hr flight up to Monterey.

The flight itself was spectacular! That I would be flying along the Californian coast, enjoying the view, seeing a group of dolphins bouncing of the glimmering pacific and seeing a big whale wasn’t really something that I had pictured myself doing when I first took the tests for the flight school back home in VästerÃ¥s four years ago… Trust me it was amazing!

The flight up went really well, no bigger problems at all and we landed safely sometime around 11 o’ clock after a beautiful approach with the racetrack on our right side, a valley below us and oceanside Monterey in front!

That this was the biggest annual happening in the city was something that we had to learn the hard way later when we tried to get hold of a room for the night… it took… well, quite a while

Anyway, the first day at the track was awesome! Lots of people, cloudless skies, crazy views, cold beer, all of it just made the atmosphere even better! Of course we all stood up to greet the american national anthem, besides Johan that is haha, and watching the low bypass of two F-18 Hornets which made the american patriots to cheer even more!

After a long day, without sun block………. we all took our shiny red bodies down to montereys harbour for some food and lodging. We ended up walking, for I don’t know how long…., to get hold of a two person bedroom with one king size bed for a reasonable price (thanks bertil for the nice negotiation with the indian boss there! haha). The fact that we were six and not two was something that we left unsaid

So when we finally managed to get hold of this room we just dropped of all our stuff and then started our adventure towards food. Trust me it really turned out to be an adventure… I do regret I didn’t bring my walking boots because it felt like we walked all the way to San Francisco before we finally found a place that seemed decent! The guide for the evening was Lars so maybe that’s why, who knows? Included in this adventure was also some celebrity spotting in form of Fabio!!! The other guys just laughed at me when I came walking with a laughter and the worlds biggest smile saying “Guys you won’t believe me but guess who’s sitting at the resturant over there”

Bertil, as the papparazzi he really is, couldn’t leave before he made sure that he actually got a good picture of him. The picture ended up pretty good, including a flash which had everyone looking up at bertil and laughing after he snapped the shot. Eyecontact and a salute from Fabio… We basically laughed our arses of when Bertil came running with the camera!

Ahh Im drifting again… this is getting long so Im just gonna cut down on the story telling a bit here

Two more things about the evening though.

After one hour of waiting for a table we finally got one but the service at the place was terrible… food was quite okey I guess but we ended up leaving the place after basically beeing stressed oout of our chairs…

The taxi back home sure did wonders to our feet and we ended up splitting the double madrass bed into two beds sleeping three guys in each… no no no don’t start getting any ideas now…

To summarize the second day a bit shorter than the first; we hade a really nice breakfast at Hilton hotel, we watched the MotoGP and some other entertaining stuff out at the track, we got ourselves even more burned and we got to see them hornets one more time! We left the raceway at around 4pm, took a cab to the airport back to our small cessnas which by now was surrounded by private jets that were beeing prepared to get all the celebrities home. At departure we had at least four helicopters just transporting people from the track to the jets at the airfield…

The trip home was flewn by Martin and Johan since me and Bertil were the ones taking us up to Monterey. It all went well, we landed in Santa Barbara for some fuel and food before we made our way over a night-time Los Angeles. Johan, Bertil and Jonas ended up having some problems with one instrument so they flew directly home and made two approaches here in San Diego meanwhiles Martin, Lars and me took a stop at the airport “John Wayne” in the middle of LA. All three of us got scared as crap when a lowflying helicopter somehow ended up looking like a landing jumbo heading straight towards us. Other than that the flight went on really well… yeah besides that one and a half hour I spent in the  backseat ofthe  plane not beeing able to move becuase of all the beer and water from the track reeeaaally wanting to leave my body… (Bad english but whatever… ^^)

We landed back at Gillespie sometime around 12pm and decided to take the briefing at some other point since we were all kind of tired. So we took our cars back home and talked a bit about the adventure before we went to bed.

Now that’s everything I can think of at the moment. Now Im just wondering when Im gonna have time and stamina to blog about 4th of July and this weekends 20 year celebration of Madeleine…

I hope you are all doing fine back home or wherever you are!

Stay tuned for more updates and don’t forget to check out the pictures, or that you can comment the blogs or leave your mark in the guestbook!

Best Regards

Marcus

In about 6 hours we will be on our way to Monterey for the Laguna Seca MotoGP race.
We will fly two Cessna 172’s with swedish instructors. A short stop at Santa Barbera Airport for refueling. This will be really COOL!

Bye for now!

/Berra, Pimpim, Martin, Johan

The last week has been pretty busy, but not so much flying though. After the nice presentation of the house in El Cajon we decided to rent it. After some credit approvals and a lot of work to get money to the deposit, we finally moved in. First of all we had to get beds, so we went to IKEA San Diego in our Ford wagon. After deciding what beds we wanted a problem came up. How do we transport this four beds to our house…

IKEA’s home delivery service wasn’t able to transport them until monday, and this was on saturday so that wouldn’t work. We tried to buy a cheap Gazebo tent in the store next to IKEA just so we could use their delivery service but they were real bitchy about that, cause they understood why we wanted the truck
Okay, so we are standing outside IKEA…. The clock is 10pm and the store closed one hour ago, the parking lot is pretty much empty. Hmm.
Lets do something here. It was now I got the bright idea to use the nice roof of our car. So we went to a store to get two heavy duty straps. We tied down one of the beds on the roof without problem and went home. IKEA is about 20 min away from our home so it took about 3 hours to get all beds home but what the hell, it worked..

A couple of days later we went to IKEA again and bought some more furniture like kitchen table, sofas, some european style interior stuff and much more.

So now we are almost set up for our moving-in-party. It’s gonna be crazy!
I just hope our white sofas will survive the night.

In general we havn’t been that much at the school. I did my first instrument flight today and the other guys are going to that tomorrow (saturday) and also on sunday. It’s a real busy airspace out there, no question about it. That makes it real fun.

I’ll post some pictures at the gallery.

Take care
Berra

Hi folks!
Hope your doing okay out there, cause we are doing great! Today was a day of many great things - “Pimpim Volcom Sjöberg” has begun to mature, Bertil has finally done a haircut and Johan - well, he is still Johan. So what have we done today? Well, to begin with Bertil has been flying a little (without the help of drugs this time) and he found out that we will have a mess to sort out up there. Everyone is flying everywhere, and almost everyone are from India so you could do the math on your own. We also managed to rent a house today, a real bargain with jacuzzi and a big stoorageroom for beer - which is actually all that we need.

Now to the funny stuff, I bought a car today for myself. Actually it´s the first car I have ever own, so I thought it would be good with a Cadillac for a starter. So know I am the proud owner of a Cadillac Coupe DeVille with a 4.5L V8 engine with pure American Muscles. Thankfully, the socialists are pretty few down here so the gas is pretty cheap - otherwise I would be ruined, and thats for sure.

Thats all for me today, now I have to prepare for the big Independence Day tomorrow - the big party that would make the Swedish 6th of june to look like a funeral.

Cheers!

/Martin

Yesterday when we bought our car we met Junior, a cool surfer guy from Brazil. He recommended us to get our car insurance at The Insurance Palace. The day after we went to this place and got our insurance….We later found out that Junior got a rebate to send us there but what the hell, we had the oppertunity to meet Kelly, an older guy who’s father had been a B-52 pilot. He showed us the coolest checklist ever, the B-52 Nuclear Bomb Delivery Procedure!!
He told us that he had his car full of these old checklists, and he was just laughing….

Kelly “Nuclear” Frost, A true American Hero haha!

Check it out……

Cheers
Berra