Much to do about nothing

Having finished my Instrument Rating I have a few days break then start my Airline Transport Pilots Licence (ATPL). The ATPL is a must have if you wish to fly large carrier airliners or be able to charge money for working as a pilot.

The course is a total of six months. It is broken into into 2 modules each lasting 3 months and covers 7 subjects in each module. This means one thing, 14 more big and heavy books to read.

This all starts on Monday so I'm sure I'll give you more details then but for now it means I have a couple of days rest, calm before the storm if you like.

Unfortunately due to money being tight there is very little I can do on these rest days because most things cost too much. That said today I had to do something as I'm going a little stir crazy at home (having done all the cleaning and ironing) and from the sounds of things so are my colleagues on the course. Initial ideas were to drive to South Beach in Miami but after 2 of the guys got very very drunk the night before and were not able to stand until late afternoon the next day that idea has been shelved.

We ended up going to a crazy golf course followed by the Cheesecake Factory and finally rolled to the Irish pub to sit outside and relax.

The crazy golf was good fun and is certainly different from any I had played in the UK with its waterfalls, caves etc but I was satisfied with my final score and coming a close second out of the 4 of us that went.

I love the Cheesecake Factory, the food is always great but the portions are just stupidly large, no wonder half of America is obese if this is their normal portion size.

The portions are so huge that I could imagine them doing some sort of charity advert. "Just donate $16 dollars and we will donate one main portion to the feed somewhere obscure appeal, that's enough to feed a small country for 1 year".

I struggled through my main but couldn't believe there were people sitting across from us that had managed starters, mains with sides and desert!

All of us thoroughly stuffed we decided to go and relax on 5th Avenue (the main high street in Naples) at the Irish pub called "Paddy Murphy's". This is the typical hangout for most of the students and instructors at the flying school and within about 20minutes our numbers had swelled from the original 5 of us to 25+.

Because I was driving I wasn't drinking just sitting back relaxing joining in the conversations. Then it struck me, when growing up my mum always complained to my dad that if they went out with flying friends the conversation would be solely dominated by flying and she would be bored stiff. I had always found the conversations intriguing even if I had not fully understood them at the time but today here I was doing just the same thing as my dad and couldn't help but think how bored my mum would have been had she been here (but I was loving it).