First Leg: Diepholz AB - Bremen - Nordholz Navy - Kührstedt-Bederkesa

Off we go! Without much talk, let's just dive right in, or up, to start our journey around the world and what better place to start from than an Air Base in a tiny German town in Lower Saxony.
We depart east from runway 08. Aircraft is ready, all things are set. This is the Cessna Skyhawk RJT-2209 ready for takeoff.

 Hm, maybe a life insurance would have been a good idea.

I'll go ahead and say it, the terrain isn't exactly what you would call stunning and neither are my graphics settings. To be fair: it's been very hot around here for the last few days and I'm not on a desktop computer because I simply don't own one. My laptop just isn't gonna be able to compete with some of the flight simulation rigs that some people have.
But I'm enjoying myself up here as we head north to Bremen, which is just 15 minutes of flight. Right after takeoff we already get to tune Bremen tower and communicate our intentions.

 And it's not long until we see the airport with a Boeing taking off.

Turns out though the air traffic controller might have bitten off a little more than he can chew at the moment as the traffic situation on and around the airport is getting a little hairy.

I have no idea how the guy second in line here would at all think there was a way he would land that final.

And it leads to the inevitable go-around.

"Oh come on, I can't just piggyback him?"

This has the desirable side-effect of putting us next in line for landing though so we get a pretty straight forward left traffic approach.

I am in fact aware that I circled pretty far away from the airport.

 But that glideslope though!

 But whatever, let's leave this whole mess behind us, push the throttle forward and run straight back out of this. One last look across our shoulder...

 Dicks.

... and we go north again, heading for Nordholz.

 

Here's the way we've gone so far:

As we head for Nordholz, we go above Bremerhaven, which also has an airport that mostly serves islands in the North Sea and IRL is on the brink of being closed because cargo related to the offshore wind power facilities will be handled on the Weser river right in front of the airport, making aviation activities close to impossible. The traffic that currently relies on Bremerhaven Airport will be relocated to Nordholz at some point in the future which itself is not seeing much use now as the Navy forces there have been downsized massively. Here's a look at Bremerhaven:

You can see the runway's PAPI lights. Shortly after flying over Bremerhaven, Nordholz Navy is already visible. We're heading with the Autobahn 29 to Cuxhaven, which is on the coast of the Elbe and the North Sea, north of Nordholz.

Imagine seeing someone drive like an asshole down there and up in the air, you don't even have a reason to get upset. That would blow.

Shortly before Nordholz the wind suddenly picks up quite a bit and I get into some trouble, my airspeed jumping all over the place and I'm being pushed into a right bank that you can't see on the screenshot but it was pretty chaotic.

Luckily it subsides for our approach. As I'm on the downwind, you can see the main runway of the facility and a small dirt runway next to it. The concrete runway belongs to the Navy airport, the other one is in the books as a runway belonging to Nordholz-Spieka, a different airport altogether. This seems to not be based very much on reality, where civilian aircraft can regularly use the Navy's runway the way I will do now.

 Let's get such a nice glideslope again.

Goddamn it.

After a bit of a weird approach (I screwed up turning to final and my glideslope was all fucked), we touch and go, turning south again to go to Kuhrstedt. 

Here's our progress so far:

Kührstedt is close enough to not even warrant going over a thousand feet. If you imagine that airfield looking anything like one, you're dead wrong. This is Kührstedt-Bederkesa:

Hell yeah, let's land like a man.

I spotted it real late and had to make a weird turn across a hill. It was ugly.

Well, how does a man land?

Rolling back onto the "runway" though, we end our first leg after about an hour of flying time!

A lot more fun than taking then train every time I visit my parents.

 So that's it for leg 1, Diepholz to Kührstedt! Some leisure VFR on a fine day to start off our journey, I like that. Nothing complicated and save for two pretty botched approaches I didn't even fly that airplane like an idiot and that's a pretty nice thing to say about myself. Thank you guys for reading and all that! I appreciate any comments you might have, any suggestions, requests, ideas, I'll take them all and I really welcome the input.

Next up: Another light aircraft takeoff from Kührstedt-Bederkesa (EDXZ), heading for Stade (EDHS), then Hamburg (EDDH). A shorter leg than this one, it will set us up on a major international airport to grab a jet aircraft and head for Scandinavia.