Due to the restrictive airspace around London, I decided to steer well to the south-east of Booker (Wycombe Air Park) to avoid their airspace and instead overflew Marlow where there are some pretty big, expensive looking houses, I can tell you.
Henley is just as picturesque from the air as from the ground and I could see the Thames winding its way off to Reading in the distance. I picked up the Compton VOR (CPT) and when I was overhead, turned on my heading for Didcot. When planning, I had been a little concerned about this bit as the leg would squeeze me between the Benson MATZ and the P106 prohibited zone. P106 is marked as going up to 2500ft so I climbed to 3000 to be on the safe side. As it happened, I could easily see Didcot power station from CPT and up until then, my calculated headings had been pretty spot on, so I was confident in making a straight line for Didcot without infringing anywhere. I also had the plane's Garmin GNC 250XL confirming my accuracy which is a fantastic confidence booster. This also meant that visibility at 3000ft to the ground was at least 15km, which was nice.
Over Didcot I descended to just under 2000ft for a good look keeping my eye on the towers of the power station. The road layout was very difficult to identify from the air at first, but Simon spotted the big Asda which is just opposite the Army base (Vauxhall Barracks) where Adam's family used to live so that then became easy to see.
After that, we headed over to Hinton and Simon's parents were once again outside waving a table cloth, though we could see them easily enough without. Then it was back over Oxford (where we flew past Oxford United's footy ground) and then via the now familiar NDBs of WCO and HEN towards Bovingdon and home.
It was a lot of fun to be flying again, and Adam thoroughly enjoyed himself. He was suprised at how much you could see and how much detail you could make out, even when we were at 3000ft.