I’ve been travelling all over the past few weeks; the route was something like Málaga – London – Maldon (Essex) – Hadlow (Kent) – Antwerp – Brussels – Popperingen – North Weald – Málaga. It’s all a bit of a blur, to be honest but I’m safe home now and planning some fun updates.

Meanwhile, Plastic Pilot is celebrating his 500th blog post with a contest! He’s looking for aviation-related photographs which will be put up to a vote by his readers next month and some fun prizes (and fame and fortune of course!) to the winners. But today’s the LAST DAY so make sure to get your entries in quick:

Enter the Plastic Pilot photo contest right now!

As I play catch-up with the rest of my life, I leave you with this view of London from Wednesday’s flight to get you into the mood. Although considering how cold it was, I thought I’d be in for clear skies, I was very disappointed as we flew past London and I found it was covered in murk!

We arrived home yesterday after a lovely trip getting caught up with everyone. We went to England to drop Connor off at school (*sniffle*) and to see Cliff’s mum then on to Strasbourg to check out Tony’s new digs, from there a quick jaunt to Mannheim to visit with my grandmother and then last night we flew home again to Spain.

Here’s my quick-pick favourite photographs from the flying:

Taking off from Málaga airport. It’s rare that the sky is so crystal clear, usually everything is in a dull haze and you consider yourself lucky if you can see where the sea ends and the sky begins. I wish I could have taken more photographs while it was so clear.

The weather was variable – Cliff did all the flights IFR. The streaky clouds and hazy skies made for some interesting views.

Cliff’s perfect landing at Strasbourg. I held the camera up and snapped, hoping that I had the angle right. I was surprised to find out it worked!

The view flying over the Alps at 10,000 feet. We flew over Lake Geneva but it is always odd to me to be that high and still see mountains higher than us.

Angouleme Tower last night, while Cliff was radioing for clearance. The initial hour of the flight passed quickly as we watched the sun set into dark red clouds. Then we ran into 30 knot headwinds which lasted most of the way home. We finally arrived at Málaga at midnight.

I’d like to do a print of these cattle to give to the owner. But I have been really struggling to choose a shot. I started looking at them one-by-one and then I got a bit hyper with Photoshop and playing with black and whites and sepia tones. So now, not only do I not know which photograph I like best, I don’t know whether to use effects or not. Help!

You can click through any of the images to see them in full-size in Flickr. Let me know what you think both in terms of the composition and the effects. I need to have made a decision by Thursday evening so I’m starting to panic!

Feel free to respond on the photographs if you have a Flickr account – or just let me know by row and column number here in the comments!