We headed for the airfield anyway just to see and an instructor had just returned proclaiming that the cloud base should be high enough. I decided to go and see and if it was clear that I would be able to get over the Chilterns ok, then I would head out over my planned route, otherwise we would just head back in. At least he would get off the ground this time.
As it happened, the cloud base was easily 2500' amsl so that was it, we were off. Matt didn't have any particular preferences so I had decided we would go searching for chalk horses around Wiltshire, take in the stone circle at Avebury and then overfly Oxford and also Milton (by Didcot) where he had also once lived.
The Wiltshire horses are all marked on the half mil chart so I planned a route that would take in 5 of them (2 others are inside the Lyneham CTA which I decided not to try for). The chart has a wind farm marked south-west of Newbury so I included that, too. This meant that outbound routing could go via Marlow, Henley-on-Thames, Reading and Newbury (including the race course and a look at what Greenham Common is like now). The return would be my usual circumnavigation of Benson MATZ.
The overall flight plan with the wind at 2000' of 235/25 was: