Loved this year's calendar, so I'd like a shot at the 2020 one, so here goes...
I was asked by a friend to help ferry a new purchase of his over from Weston Airport near Dublin, to Suffolk, near Ipswich. We set off in one of his other helis, calling via Liverpool for fuel and to don survival suits for the Irish Sea hop. However weather grounded us in Liverpool, so we had to book rooms overnight hoping for fairer weather next day. It didn't clear, but a fellow aviator in a 6-seat Piper something was about to hop across to Weston, so we hitched a ride with him all the way in cloud, with icing and imbalanced propeller being a lasting memory of the flight, which caused some clenched buttocks until we were safely on Irish soil, having left the original heli parked at Liverpool. We flew the new acquisition back, routing over the city of Dublin, East to Anglesey, into Liverpool, to split and each ferry a heli home.
Maybe he's braver, maybe he has better eyesight than me, managing to fly straight home, but I just couldn't see my way through the N-S line of murk across the country, keeping me from further Eastwards progress, as I picked my way SE, until I could go no further, and had to put down at Shobdon for the night, accepting a kind offer of a bed for the night from a benevolent B&B part-time local pilot (sadly now deceased). It was the coldest night of the Winter, -8 if I remember, so clearing the ice off the blades and even getting the engine started next day was a slow and difficult procedure, helped by kind advice from a highly experienced heli pilot who was associated with Tiger Helicopters (sadly also deceased as well now). The final leg from Shobdon to Suffolk was uneventful, but memorably beautiful for all the frost, and snow sprinkled over the Malverns in the bright Winter sun, as I continued Eastwards across England's beautiful countryside.
What was meant to be a (long) day trip turned out to be about a 48hour marathon due to weather, but also one of the most memorable trips, for the sheer joy of VFR flight in a heli, avoiding weather and taking time to marvel at the beauty of what we fly over, yet seldom fully appreciate.