Page 299 - Demo

295dents and could help supervise them if necessary. Complete nonsense of course but that was how this Jolly was sold to the powers that be. Our Squadron went to walk the Appalachian Trail in the USA and also to do some white water rafting there. We duly arranged Indulgence flights to Washington and arranged hire vehicles for ourselves. One problem we had was with Serge our French Exchange Officer. We had to get visas to visit the USA then and all the passports were duly sent off but while the RAF ones came straight back duly signed off, Serge%u2019s did not. The Americans were just being a bit awkward and took their time to deal with it. With time running out before departure we arranged with Lyneham that Serge could go as supernumerary crew where he would not need a visa. It was somehow arranged that his passport would be sent out to us when it was ready so that he could get back.The Appalachian trail is about 2000 miles long I think but we were just going to do a short bit. We booked into lodges on the way and each day one group drove down to the next one and left their vehicle there before walking back. The other group walked the normal way and handed over the car keys when we met. Surprisingly it all went well. We moved all our food and several crates of beers in the vehicles. The trail itself was rather boring as all you could see were trees, but we did see the odd brown bear and some other creatures. After a few days of this we moved onto the white-water rafting. I think we went via some civil war sites. The rafting was great fun. There were quite a number of people on the trip with several rafts. The RAF were mostly on one raft, But there was a young American couple with us as well. We had a safety brief where anyone who had any drugs had to leave them somewhere as it was dangerous to raft while drugged. We were all a bit surprised at this and assured the organisers that we had none. The flow came from a release of water from a dam and once we had finished, would be stopped until the next day. We then met our female coxswain and put on wetsuits as the water was very cold. She told us to climb up some rocks and