Flight

I had grand plans for the Easter weekend and I'd booked the Tuesday/Wednesday off work to extend the break so I could go flying in some exotic locations like Wales or the Lake District.  Inevitably the weather didn't play ball and while Good Friday was nice, it was tricky to get away from a busy Combe Gibbet.  Of course the next good flying day is the day I go back to work.  So after some cunning negotiations I go to work on the Tuesday and get Thursday off instead.  It's looking like a very good decision at 11am when the sky looks like it does in all of Carlo's photos!
This was my first time at Westbury and I'd even pooh-poohed the idea of going there for XC a few days before due to the proximity of the airspace and the difficulty of going over the back.  But with Combe looking windy and Leckhampton not sounding that inviting in the site guide, Westbury seemed like the best choice.
The clouds were lining up in streets very nicely, which meant climbing out front until I drifted too close to the danger area, then pushing forward to the next climb and doing the same again.  The next move was to push crosswind to the next cloud street to the west and try and get a climb over Westbury town, but I resolved not to make that move until I was at cloudbase.
With the airspace so close behind and the thermals so close together I soon decided that I wasn't going to bother turning for anything less than 1.5m/s, so I got a relatively quick lift to cloudbase.  Wahey! First time at cloudbase since September.  It's been a long winter.
Ok time to push over to the town.  I spotted a nice looking cloud and headed for the darkest bit of it's base.  I lost about half my height making the crossing and I was down to about 1500ft when I arrived over the town and under the cloud.  And the bleeps I'd been expecting didn't materialise.  Okay, need a new plan.  The town looked inviting and there was more of it upwind, but I did too much flying upwind and ending up on the ground last year, s