I am a bit of a fan of the permit as compared to the C of A aircraft, really on grounds of price.
However, yesterday I flew Old Buckenham to Gamston to collect my daughter, who is at Sheffield Uni. A friend has a PA28 which he has no time to fly, so we quickly came to a reasonable arrangement. On departing Old Buck I hit some showers and low cloud. West of Kings Lynn and over the Lincolnshire fens I ran into some further low cloud, so was IMC for a while before emerging into the bright sun of a winter's day, which persisted all the way to Gamston.
Now, my daughter takes after her parent. Has her father's good looks, of course.
Also has inherited her mothers inability to travel light. In fact, we have over the years held up RyanAir's share price with excess baggage.
Two suitcases, a laptop and a huge shoulder bag (what do they really find to carry?) all went into the rear and we headed for home.
Same cloud on the way back, this time climbing to 6000' for VFR on top all the way back to Norfolk.
What a beautiful day. The point of all this is that I could not have done this trip in my last aircraft, the Pioneer, on grounds of being both day VFR only and because of the limited MAUW. I suppose an RV of some sort would have addressed one of these issues but not the other (not legally anyway). So, sometimes you need a conventional C of A aircraft to do the business. Knowing someone who has one begging to be flown is a good solution.
My girl is studying photography. I didn't notice her snapping away until we got home. She has some real arty stuff, one of which will go on the wall when I have the time. I might even post here if I can work out how to do it.