Around the World eastbound; July-October 2009

Dear Family and Friends, In July of 2009, Lucky Lady Too and I found ourselves in Austria ready to join 10 other airplanes on an east bound "Around the World" flight. My good friend, Bob Bates, who kept an eye on LLT when she was parked in Papua New Guinea in October of 2003, joined us for the front half of the trip - Austria east to Anchorage, Alaska. You can read his informative blog of our stops in Turkey, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia and over the Bearing Sea into Alaska at http://www.pngtours.com/tours/fly.htm.
In Nome, Alaska, we departed the flying group. In Anchorage, Little Bob said his good-byes and my mechanic, Keith Roller, took over the co-pilots seat to fly further into northern Alaska then down the "Trench" of British Columbia, Canada. Each year I must have a complete mechanical check up on Lucky Lady Too by a US registered mechanic. I departed the USA 9 years ago and Keith has been instrumental in making those annuals possible. .
After parking LLT in Seattle, WA area for three weeks to get caught up with business, I returned to continue east across the middle of Canada. We weaved our way thru the Rockies, past stunning Banff National Park stopping along the way in Calgary, Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Uranium City, Stony Rapids and Churchill. In Churchill I saw my first Polar Bear in the wild and large pods of Beluga Whales. A fascinating fact: it took 450 people 5 days to cut up a 60 ton whale..
When I was in high school the largest province of Canada was the Northwest Territory. Today most of that has been renamed Nunavut and the capital is Iqaluit. Departing Canada at Pangnirtung, Nunavut we crossed the Baffin Bay to Ilulissat, Greenland (formerly known as Jakobshavn, about half-way up the west coast). .
Greenland is the world's largest island. It's a giant ice cap rising to 9,000 feet elevation with glaciers all around the perimeter. Ilulissat sits next to the most productive glacier in the northern hemisphere, Sermeq Kujalleq. The glacier births giant icebergs, some the size of a small village, into a 35 mile long fjord that spits them out into the Baffin Sea. The beauty of this rare ice fjord has no parallel in the world and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1994. .
We arrived in Iceland to find the government and people working hard to correct their recent financial collapse. Moving southeast to the cloud shrouded Faroe Island, we entered Western Europe at Dublin, Ireland to pay respect to my forefathers who braved the Atlantic "by sea" to come to the new world. Next was the Isle of Man, England, and then onto mainland Europe at historical Bruges, Belgium. The fall colors were in full spectrum as we continued with stops in Germany then south thru the Alps of Switzerland. In Italy we landed in Venice, Florence, Siena and Rome to see all the historical sites. .
Donning my life jacket again, we headed into the Mediterranean Sea to land in Corsica, Menorca and Ibiza then onto mainland Spain to fly over the white hill towns of Ronda and Zahara. After browsing the cities of Granada and Seville, Spain we headed west along the Algarve coast to enter Portugal at Faro then north to Evora, another UNESCO World Heritage site. We learned about the miracles of Fatima and then headed south to Lisbon where we jumped 700 nautical miles west to the lush islands of the Azores. We had to wait for a storm to come across the Atlantic before catching the back side of it to help push us 1,400 nautical miles west to a warm welcome in chilly St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada. Lucky Lady Too is now parked in the Boston area .
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So far.. So good,.
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Bob Gannon and Lucky Lady Too .
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