Our Saturday day of rest is exactly that. All thoughts of sightseeing, running, swimming or other adventures go out the window in favour of sleeping and lounging (oh and tackling the mammoth laundry pile). The last week of paragliding has worn us out!

On Sunday we start back up again, as the big kids in school. James and Rosie have gone home and are replaced with James (from Scotland), joining us on the CP course, and Mike and Cam, the new EP students, plus a whole host of experienced pilots doing a cross country experience.

We spend the next couple of days at Montellano grappling with the conditions and ‘parawaiting’ all day long often for one perfect flight at about 7pm. It could become frustrating, but the scenery is beautiful and the weather amazing (just not for beginner paragliders!) We return to the tandems at one point just to get us all in the air and practice rapid descent techniques such as Big Ears which we will need to demonstrate solo in order to gain our CP qualification. On one visit Ben gets a second flight before conditions change and it is decided that Beck and Clive cannot follow him. They are not at all jealous (oh no!) but make him wait until last on the next few flights to even the ‘score’. On another occasion we fly alongside the cross-country pilots who have been ‘parawaiting’ all day too. Beck lands in the midst of four other female pilots, including Erin and her amazing flying wheelchair, making a chain of five women flyers. After the sausage fest that has been learning to fly, it’s a fabulous moment of camaraderie. Two of the pilots are Irish and we think about them again a few weeks later when Ireland emphatically votes to legalise abortion – it seems women are breaking down barriers everywhere – and long may it continue.

The waiting also means that we have plenty of time to get all the CP theory out of the way and by Tuesday afternoon we have completed the theory exam leaving three full days to focus on flying.

On Wednesday we change venue and head for Lucena. The take-off spot is limited – a narrow strip right next to a road. We prepare our kit on the road itself as there is no other space. Luckily, it’s a quiet road, but not long after we’ve moved off, a bike comes tearing down the hill – it’s lucky for both parties that we were out of the way. It is Cam and Mike’s first flight and we are thankful that ours was not from this spot, especially when Cam crashes down almost immediately following take-off, colliding with the concrete bollards that mark the road edge, putting him out of action for the rest of the day and much of the rest of the week. Clive also ends up in some bushes with a nasty graze on his arm. Beck gets off the hillside ok but messes up the landing, ending up on a gravel road next to the landing field and palm of gravel rash. She makes up for it by executing THE MOST PERFECT landing on the second flight (yes, even with all the take-off shenanigans we go again – if there’s one thing we’ve learned about paragliding, it’s that it’s important to get straight back on the ‘horse’!) In the afternoon we head back to Algo but it’s another bout of parawaiting as it’s too windy to fly.

Thursday sees the Zero Gravity boys pulling out all the stops to get us air borne. First, we try Montellano, but the wind is yet to show its face so it’s on to Ronda La Vieja where we manage two solo flights each. On the second Beck manages to land badly and turn her ankle. At first it seems ok, but a day or so later it has blown up like a balloon so it’s probably no bad thing that our flying time is coming to a close. We break for lunch at Setenil de las Bodegas, a pretty village with amazing overhanging rocks which line the riverside where we eat. The food is probably some of the best we’ve had in the two weeks of paragliding, but we can’t linger as we need to get back to Ronda La Vieja if we are to fly again today. Disaster though! In time that we have been lunching, the wind has completely changed direction making take-off at Ronda impossible. But Javi and Pablo are not to be defeated. We set off in the vans to the backside of the hill and bushwhack our way to a potential site. The boys test out the conditions while we simply enjoy the view. It’s still not to be as there is too much turbulence. We appreciate the effort that they put into trying to find us a flyable site, but they also always have safety at the forefront and won’t just push us off a cliff to get a flight!

Our last day of flying sees us taking off from Algo Levante. It feels perfect as it’s where we took our very first flights as tandems way back at the start of our first week. It just highlights our pace of development. Whilst we are still by no means the fully-fledged paragliding package, we are flying solo, making decisions for ourselves (under observation and support from the ground when needed) and we can perform manoeuvres such as Big Ears, Asymmetric Tucks, 360degree turns – it’s not bad progress for two weeks of tuition! Both of us get great thermal lift under Pablo’s expert guidance (and much to the dismay of Clive who goes straight from top to bottom – I think the phrase: “you lucky, lucky bastards” was used on more than one occasion). The 360degree turns corkscrew us upward, following the thermal column, making this flight the longest we’ve had so far. It’s the closest we’ve come to independent flying and it’s so peaceful and beautiful, yet also exhilarating. At one point the radio crackles to life: “Beck, it’s Javi, just to let you know that you’re not alone up there, we’re watching you from the ground but for now, just keep doing what you’re doing.” It’s this brilliant combination of ‘independence with hand holding’ that we have seen from the team throughout our course. Ben executes the perfect landing pattern of ‘S’ turns but a tangled radio strap stops him getting out of the harness at the last moment, leading to a dramatic-looking butt landing which is more funny than dangerous.

As it turns out, this is our last flight for this holiday, so we literally end on a high, but to be honest, I think if we had been offered the opportunity to fly again, we might have been reluctant, having had such a perfect experience.

We spend lunch at Zahara de la Sierra, a pristine village overlooking the reservoir just outside Algo. It’s somewhere we would both consider staying if we returned to this area, yet we also agree that it would be hard to stay outside of Algo and miss out on the evenings socialising with other pilots on the main strip (and in particular, the delights of watching the boy racers in their beat-up Nissans!)

All in all, during our two weeks here, we have done 14 solo flights from 5 different locations. Not bad for newbies! Our first week felt like it went on forever (in a good way), yet the last few days have flown by (excuse the pun). Still, we find time on our departure day to drop off some appreciative beers for the team, returning again to drop off a lemon as a backatcha to Pablo’s jokey complaint that we didn’t bring any Radler lemon beers. It’s been a brilliant section of our trip and we have a feeling that Algo hasn’t seen the last of us!