We arrived in Garmish after about 18 hours on the road through Sweden, Denmark and Germany. Very good test for the road navigation part of the GPSMAP 60CS, it performed very good, and gave us directions all the way to the parking lot outside the expo in Garmish.

The free flight expo 2004 was nice, lots of stuff on display, but no really big news for me. The hangglider makers seemed to focus on the beginner and intermediate marked, the only racing glider on display was the new Moyes Litespeed S with a “smoke” sail. I picked up a new licence of CompeGPS, and talked to the programmers about the features regarding the competition version of the program, the next version will include all RACE parts so we can score a comp with just CompeGPS, very nice! The new CompeGPS version has a really nice 3D engine, it was really impressive to see with good satelite photos as maps.

We spent the night in Küssen, and drove to Skyline in Übersee to arrange picking up our gliders from the airport in München, and I also needed to pick up a new harness as Moyes did not make mine in time to send to with the glider. Around noon we got the bad news that the gliders were not in München after all, but probably on a truck somwhere on the road from Amsterdam. If we are lucky they will arrive tomorrow… Crap, but not totally unexpected.

I spend the day fitting parachute and adjusting my new Skyline Zero Drag Racer harness, I bought one of the demo harnesses from the Skyline stand at the expo so I had something to fly with until my Moyes Matrix arrive. The Skyline fitted me nicely, and it seemed very nice and smooth. I’ll see after a few hours in the air with it, maybe I’ll be happy with it so I’ll cancel the Moyes Matrix. I also got a instrument pod for the Brauniger Compeo, to make it more practical to have on the basebar.

All we can do now is wait and see if we get some gliders tomorrow afternoon, if not we have to get them on Wednesday, and drive straight to Bassano. Probably we will have do the first flight with the new gliders the first competition day, which really sucks… But nothing we can do now…