Ricardo,

I run the scenic glider ride business in Hollister,
CA called Bay Area
Glider Rides. I can help get you scheduled with the
Hollister Gliding Club
though. They had removed their e-mail address because
of the spam and
where wanting people to call now. I can understand
not wanting to call
from France though.

The Hollister Gliding Club only provides training and
tows and then once
the student earns their license they join the Bay Area
Soaring Associates
(BASA) which has gliders for members to fly out of
Hollister and some
Sierra locations. So we do not have a glider for rent
other than dual with
an instructor. The glider available for training is
a Schweizer 2-32 which
has a 34:1 glider ratio. You could also try finding
a BASA club member to
fly with and offer to pay for the tow. Right now they
have a Grob 103 in
Hollister(an hour drive from Monterey) and a DG-1000
in Truckee (about
4.5 hours from Monterey). The best way to find a BASA
member would
be to post something to the Hollister Gliding Club
Yahoo Group which you
can find a link to sign up for at http://www.soarhollister.com


BASA's web site is http://www.flybasa.org

If you wanted to enjoy a scenic glider flight over
the Monterey Bay area
with someone else we do offer 2 passenger rides but
their are no
controls in the passenger area for this glider ride
option. The options for
these rides can be found at http://www.BayAreaGliderRides.com
there is
an e-mail contact on my web site that will reach me
also.

Sorry for the e-mail confusion. If you can think of
where you found the
bad e-mail please let me know and I will try to get
it removed.

Thank you,

Drew Pearce
Bay Area Glider Rides

At 12:06 20 June 2007, Ricardo Rocha wrote:
Hi.

I have a french gliding license, and as i have to go
to the US for a
short period, it would be nice to do some gliding over
there. I had a
very short notice - i'm getting there this saturday,
so no time to
prepare this properly, but staying in Monterey for
5 days i looked up a
bit for clubs that could take me up.

I've tried to contact the closest club a few days ago
(
http://soarhollister.com) using the email ,
with
no reply. The email was not listed on the website but
somewhere else,
so
maybe it is not active.

I also checked the SSA website for the formalities
of flying in the US
with a foreign license, and it seemed like a task for
a lot more than
the two days i have left before getting there, which
means i need to fly
double. I don't mind at all, just need to find a place.

Does anyone know if this would be possible in this
region?

Thanks a lot,
Ricardo