My most memorable "long" flight wasn't that long after all, but might just qualify for this thread. Another glider story.
I had enrolled once again in a weeks gliding course at the club near Zwolle. After a check flight on monday I was let solo again and was having the time of my life in the single-seater Junior. Conditions were reasonable so several flights of half an hour (the maximum agreed upon time) were doable.
Wednesday was drawing to a close. The sun was setting, the last cables were rolled out from the winch, all flights were returning after 6 minutes with a report of "no lift" and my supervising instructor annouced that he wanted to do one more flight with me, to keep an eye on my progress. On the last cable of the day.
So we launch in the K-21, start circling around for lift and find none, as expected. At 230m we return to the circuit and just before entering downwind there's a tiny, tiny blip from the vario. It can't have been more than 0.5 m/s, probably even less than that. The type of thermal caused by a cow farting. But hey, we're not descending, we're alone out here, so why not give it a try. So I carefully bank into a turn and manage to hold on to that bit of lift. For well over half an hour. Eventually reaching 750m.
In the meantime we are watching the activity on the ground. All the aircraft are being pushed back to the base, washed and put in the hangar. The winch is being brought in and so forth, until the field is completely empty. In fact, we can spot our collegues already having an early beer.
All of a sudden the instructor speaks up. "Listen, it's 18:20 now, dinner is in ten minutes time and you know what's going to happen if we're late." So we get rid of the first 300 meters by doing loops, wingovers and all sorts of other things that are great energy wasters. By now we're on a very long final, well above the normal glidepath, so I push in full right rudder and sideslip the aircraft the last 400 meters down, making S-turns as we go because even with full sideslip we're going to end up too far. And I'll be damned if I'm going to need the air brakes this time. That's just too easy.
I eventually stop the sideslip about 5 meters above the ground and let the aircraft simply float to about halfway down the field, where the turnoff for the hangar is. Airbrakes, wheel brakes, we get out, push the aircraft the last 100 meters into the hangar, and make it on time for dinner with seconds to spare.
I had to look it up in my logbook and the duration of the flight was "only" 55 minutes or so, but in conditions like that, that's like an eternity.