Page 316 - Demo

312We had more rangers in my last years. We went to Rome, again out via Dijon and back via Lyon. This may have been our run and break landing and not the first one mentioned. We went to Budapest via Geeilenkirchen and back via Bruggan. We had a lovely meal one evening in a restaurant. We were the only group there and a pianist came and played throughout. When we left, he did too. The meal was amazingly cheap, so we left a bit of a tip for him. It was during the weekend of the World Cup. The younger members of the group wanted to watch it on TV and set off to find a bar showing it. Rus Morley and I went back to our hotel and were accosted on the way by some girls who wanted to have a drink with us. We politely declined and had some drinks in the bar at our hotel, where it turned out that the football was being shown. The manager asked if we minded the commentary in Hungarian which of course we were quite happy with. The next morning one of the younger QFIs admitted that he had gone into a bar on the way home with the girls we had seen. They had a few drinks and then the bill came which was huge. He said he did not have enough money to pay at which point 2 very large chaps took him to a cash machine. We could not believe that he could have been so stupid. My last ranger was to Barcelona via Cognac but I cannot remember that at all.We appear to have used the aircraft quite a bit to ferry people about, including Chris Cornish who had taken over as GSTO from Mick Taylor. We went to St Mawgan to the survival school for some kind of conference. Things changed about on the LSEs. We no longer did the escape and evasion bit which was a shame. I think that the students quite enjoyed it. We just concentrated on the survival side of things, which could be somewhat boring for the students.Then on March 2nd 2001 I flew my last sortie. It was formation and I don%u2019t think that the student was that good. He drifted out of position on the final approach and was getting ahead of the leader. I took control