I enjoy flying my little bugsmasher - an AA5 Traveler - touring around and visiting the beaches, relishing the two hundred dollar hamburgers and good company away. I enjoy taking a few launches, towing gliders up in the Pawnee, dropping them in good thermals or in the wave lift. The fun of doing precision flying, getting it right, is so cool.
But the freedom is the thing. There is no better freedom than when flying the gliders. There are so many extraordinary sensations in soaring flight, lovely chapters of true freedom and enjoyment in a friendly sky. There a days that might feel thumpy and bumpy in the Traveler but a magnificent in a glider, particularly in my single seat sailplane which looks beautiful, feels even better and has lovely long thin flexible wings that give incredible feel for what the air is doing. You feel great sensations, excitement and pleasure as you hook into a lovely strong thermal that carries you and a few hundred kilograms of sailplane up at over ten knots towards cloudbase.
Lovely experiences abound. After flying a few hundred kays, climbing really high, setting up a safe final glide from say thirty to fifty nm out and then cruising home at speed, enjoying the fast panoramic ride. Or racing with friends in other gliders around a quick closed course. Or the joy of finding a really good seabreeze front or convergence line and just fanging along at high speed in the lift, watching the sunset and changing colours. There is a lovely magic feeling when you have flown through all the bumps and lumps and rotor, scratching upwards, then you push into wind and feel the incredible smoothness of laminar flow, the upwards surge of wave lift, the satisfaction of working out the right flightpath to stay in the wave, and the absolute majesty of getting up way into the flight levels, sustained by oxygen, set up with a view from heaven's best armchair. The freedom, the sense of perspective, is so intense and delicious! You know you are really flying!
Yes there are days when you wonder why you are doing it, when you are tired of thumping around or administrivia and more jobs needing doing - but the freedom and magic is what sustains us, keeps us coming back for more.