Anyone who has flown Valle knows that a fun, but pretty short, XC flight is from the El Peñon launch to the LZ alongside the lake in town.

I've made that flight twice this week, but I don't really try for it.

It's never a sure thing, but it's pretty achievable, and on a great day, it's too easy and leads to a short flight as there really is no where to go but down once you are over the lake.

But, for two seasons, I have been trying to fly that route on the evening flight. This is also completely doable, but conditions are rarer (it's not as active in the evening, lift is smooth but lighter, and a shorter trip to the soccer field or El Jovan is much more common).

This afternoon was my last chance for this season as I don't plan to fly the afternoon during competition week.

Finishing my mole I was pretty ready to head back to town, sign in for the competition and go to bed early. But Greg from Luxembourg suggested heading up for one more afternoon flight. My head and stomach were feeling pretty good so I agreed.

Teresa and Michael jumped into the car as well, thinking we were heading back to Valle, but were easy to talk into another flight when we told them we were in fact going to launch.

At launch, we were the only gliders: Greg, myself, and Teresa and Michael on a tandem.

What a luxury! The entire sky for just 3 gliders, and all experienced pilots.

I launched first, followed by Michael/Teresa and Greg in that order.

Greg worked the ridge line while Michael and I fished out front. Getting low, I returned to the ridge to crawl back up to launch height while Michael and a newly launched hang glider found something good out front.

Working together, Greg, Michael and I climbed to about 10,500ft MSL while drifting over the back toward Sacamacate.

There was a nice fat cloud forming over Sacamacate, so I drifted that way, eventually leaving the lift and bee-lining for the cloud.

Michael took a line more over the mesa and Greg stayed to top off somewhere around 11,000ft MSL.

Michael didn't find anything, and the front of Saca wasn't working. But the lee-side was bubbling.

I hung out for a bit in zero-sink until it came together and I rode smooth wide lift to 11,000ft.

From there it was a boaty smooth-as-silk hands-off glide to town.

Greg had taken a mesa-deep line and was doing well himself.

Michael and Teresa had come off the mesa and flown over my head, skipping the lift at Sacamacate, thinking they already had town on glide—they were close, arriving a few hundred feet too low, and turning back to a field just on the outskirts of town.

Greg and I following converging paths arrived over the lake within seconds of each other and with tons of altitude.

We toured the town and then I headed out over the water, threw down a few SATs (first one very horizontal, second one better), some asymmetric spirals and a couple lousy wing-overs.

To cap my first ever evening flight to town, I glided into the LZ and biffed my landing—a little butt-bounced. But sensing the crowds of onlookers (fellow pilots and locals come to watch people land), I bounced to my feet and gave the crowd a swooping bow to a round of applause.

"Hey Wishnie! Next time, we want a water splash-down!" Josh Riggs yelled.

Hey, anything for my fans ;-)

This morning I scored my first victory by waking up, showering, and getting out the my room by 8am.

The sky was perfect blue and the air cold. This was the start of a classic Valle day, chilly and blue that quickly turns warm and white as the sun rises and the cummies pop.

People where generally hung-over and quiet on launch—and it was crowded. Lots of free flyers are in town and pretty much all the competition pilots. I was, um, slow, from my night and the lingering effects of the cactus juice, but my morning Carrot, Orange, Beet, and Celery juice was working wonders and I didn't want to miss what looked to be a great day.

I launched fairly early, but there were already at least 60 gliders in the air tracing a pretty incoherent thermalling pattern. It was a right-turn day, but even at launch not everyone had figured that out.

I launched into the mess to the tune of Dinosaur Jrs. "Freak Scene" playing on my harness mini-sound system and joined the fray.

To be honest, it sucked. Lift was decent, but the pattern was a mess and I wasn't 110% alert—as needed to track all the gliders and avoid all possible collisions. So I bailed low (around 8500ft MSL) to El Peñon.

Arriving at 7800ft I joined Bjorn, my favorite insane Swede (who I originally met in San Francisco through Taryn) who was thermaling dangerously (imho) close to the Peñon. I flew alongside him (but further from the rock) yelling "You are one f**king insane Swede", and we worked the lift together to the top on the rock where it widened into the best ride of the day: 1200fpm up to around 9500ft MSL.

From here I left Bjorn and headed to the well named "Crazy Thermal Place." This, in retrospect, was not a good idea.

The Crazy Thermal Place got it's name because the thermals are strong, turbulent, punchy, disorganized etc... etc... But if you bounced through the junk for a while the place can send you to the moon and on your way to a great cross-country.

This morning it just remined me that I was a very tiny meat-bag hanging from some rip-stop nylon, same fabric as my wind-breaker.

In other words, it handed me my a**.

After getting beat-up for about 1/2hr and never getting any higher than 10,200ft MSL, I decided to head back to the Peñon. As a farewell gift, the Crazy Thermal Place tossed me a rocket ship of a thermal and the right side of my wing disappeared behind me. This was a big asymmetric collapse.

I wasn't particularly concerned, I had plenty of height, but I wasn't prepared for the force of the reinflation. My reaction was a little slow and light and the glider surged diagonally in front of me, almost like a whip-stall, slacking the lines. I let myself be a dead weight (didn't really have much choice), and fell to the extension of the lines, snapping the glider perfectly overhead. A well executed sack-of-potatos high-five exit—which means I was hung-over but smart enough to let the glider fix itself and not make things any worse.

It was all over a in a few seconds, a cheap amusment ride, and I headed back to the relative calm of the launch ridge (of the 150 or so gliders in the air only about 30 remained around launch).

I worked my way up to about 10,000ft MSL, turned tail and ran down-wind over-the-back landing a few miles short of El Jovan, our lunch spot.

Happy to be eating my favorite Pollo en Mole Verde, and to feel the hang-over fading, I wasn't a bit jealous of the beautiful cloud street the had set up across the valley and the more patient gliders criss-crossing the sky at 13,000ft.

Ok, a little bit jealous, but man is that mole awesome!

Yesterday it rained all day. A first for me in Valle. I woke up at 7:30am as usual, heard the rain on the roof, and had zero trouble sleeping in until about 10.

Andy and I had a sit down breakfast at Tom Moock's favorite spot, La Monaraca, which specializes in Mexican breakfast, fresh fruit, and juices.

We then proceeded to the cafe with wireless Internet (where I am again writing this) where we ran into Greg Babush, Teresa Kong and Michael "Kansas".

It was about 4pm when we left, having spent the entire day sitting and eating, we needed to prepare for dinner.

I connected with Jug, Moock and Jon Clifford for dinner. Jon's a pilot and instructor from Seattle. Great pilot and nice guy. It turns out he's also a world traveler and spent a chunk of his late teens hitch-hiking across Africa. He told us a couple stories including one about trying to sell a truck in Nigeria while the two Aussies he was giving a ride to tried to sell it out from under him. And there was a story about 5 days in a Togolese jail being interrogated on a chair beneath a single light bulb. There is clearly a lot more to this guy than just being a friendly guy and balls-out Targa comp-pilot.

After dinner I ran into Team UP, Eric Reed and Josh Cohn in matching UP jackets. Eric was proudly sporting a bottle of Herradura "35Suave", a $10 bottle of tequila in a plastic bag. We went for ice cream and Eric cracked the bottle—a typical ice-cream and tequila evening!

Now it was about 10pm and I had done nothing all day but sit in cafes and restaurants and eat. I figured I'd worked hard enough and was heading home when I ran into Pat and Gigi Hajek and their buddy Anthony "Sunshine" (not kidding ;-)

They were tequila'd up a looking for a party. They offered me a swig of Jimador Oro and we headed out for the bars. Second stop we ran into the Swedish team. A few tequila shots and a hooka later, we headed en-masse to a local night club where a 20 yr girl from Mexico city teased me for drinking beer ("Why do you American's always drink beer?" she asked while swigging from a bottle of Smirnoff vodka).

There was drinking and dancing, and then in was 2:30am and I decided to head home. "You can't go! We have huge fireworks!" Anthony told me. It was a persuasive argument, but I was thinking about the last practice day before the comp, and needing to be up in 5 hours.

On the way out (me to bed, Pat, Gigi and Anthony to pyro-terrorism at Jug's hotel), we ran into a girl I'd met in the bar who is heading to Kenya in a month to work at a orphanage (we'd talked about Africa. I told her all I knew from me to-date 1 trip to East Africa). She invited us to meet her friends and have a few tacos.

While ordering, a drunken kid from Mexico city pushed his way to the counter and yelled repeatedly, in English "Two tacos bistek with cheeeeeezeeeeee-whiiiiiiz", which everyone ignored.

Having promised my new friend to introduce her to friends in Nairobi, I made my escape. Back home and in bed at 3:30am with a head full of cactus-juice.

This morning I managed to get out of bed by 8am, and make the bus to launch at 9am. On launch, everyone was subdued. I asked the Norwegian tour guides Ronnie and Toni what race route they planned for the day (they always pick a challenging task to fly) "To town! Quickly!" answered Toni. "The shade, somewhere in the shade" said Ronnie, head down, one hand on his neck.

"You guys aren't hung over are you?" I asked, "I thought it was impossible to get a Norwegian drunk."

"No, not impossible, you must try hard, and we did!" answered Tony.

They had been down the street, at another club, until 5am...

This, my friends, is how we prepare to compete in Mexico.

It's amazing how quickly I can slip out of the real world and back into the groove of Valle.

- Wake up at 7:30, grab the gear, hike down to the LZ, stop for a liquado (smoothie) breakfast on the way.

- Horse around with the gang on launch (Jug arrived yesterday, as did Destin, and Chris and Brian Howell from Jackson).

- Rockin' afternoon flight

- Lunch at Jovan--they have sushi now! Edith's brother Cesar, a sushi chef, just moved back to town.

- Back up for the evening flight--playing with the Peñon

- Back in town, tacos, ice-cream, a little email, and bed

The flights the past two days have been work. There's been some high pressure and high cloud keeping things cool and base low (10,000ft or so), but we've been able to work our way to respectable flights.

This morning, after much bouncing around the cliffs, I bailed back to launch, popped over the back and ended up at Jovan. Chris Howell, on his first flight in Valle ever, and shortly after announcing he was down and heading for the LZ, ended up taking the committing route across the mesa and all the way to town!

They say it could rain tomorrow. Here's hoping we do _not_ get a day off.

It is sooo good to be back in Valle. I love this place. Even after all my travel and flying last year, this remains my favorite place in the world to fly, hang with friends, and eat insanely awesome tacos and mole verde.

This is the first year that I haven't organized or been part of a big crew (house, driver, la enchilada completa), but things have been smooth.

I ran into Steve Wilson (instructor from Tiger in Seattle) at the airport in SF. He let me know that Rob Sporrer (Eagle Paragliding, Santa Barbara) was picking up a crew in Mexico City. Coming out of customs, there was Rob, beer in hand, waiting for his folks. With plenty of room in the van, my long trek to Valle via public transit was replaced with the cush van ride.

In Valle I found the Maison Quebecoise no problem, despite the ridiculous instructions "It's across form the Jesus Head. Everyone knows Jesus!"

This morning I took my first 'warm-up' flight, which turned into a several hour zig-zag of the area: Launch. Peñon, Wall, Cerro Gordo, Iglesia, La Casa del Presidente, San Ramon, El Jovan, town.... whew...

It was going to be a short flight, but every time I decided to landed I stumbled into a rip-roaring-valle thermal. The kind that's safer to ride up than through...

And to top out the day? I landed dry and happy by the lake, and Greg Babush walked over and placed a cold Corona in my hand.

Tomorrow we go big!