From Vilnius to Warsaw in the Second Attempt

The weather is nothing to boast of, but seen from the head Vilnius prospect it doesn`t promise so badly and so we go by bus towards the airport. The departure procedure for small aircrafts gets unpleasantly lengthy. Nobody knows what to do with us, where to put us and what we want at all. They leave us to stick half an hour here, another three quarters there. We get to the hoped-for briefing at last. I hand over the flight plan and get meteo. I want to ask about the weather on the route, but I cannot pass the language barrier.
[26.08.2006] [ Lithuania ]

Though we are at an international airport - the only one they have in Vilnius, when asked in my poor English about the weather on the route, an elderly lady at meteobriefing looks at me uncomprehendingly. After a moment of silence, she says, "paruski neznaayesh?"  I recall my Russian lessons at the elementary school. But they are of no use to me now, since I cannot say VFR in Russian and the last VFR Boeing flew out of here ages ago.

I get a map of important weather. The whole Europe takes the area of 5 times 10 centimeters, the rest of the paper occupies the legend. Of radar "niet", so we have to try our luck with "samaljotom". We thud against an impassable border of frontal cloudiness in twenty minutes of our flight. The sky has connected itself with the land. The front line is upright to our route. I try to fly to one side for a while, then to the other and in a couple of minutes we sit in Vilnius again.

They enjoy our comeback at handling, but they don`t understand what could have happened to make us turn around. Our motor works and we haven`t left any passenger here.

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