insufferable." After earning her license, she went to work for René Caudron doing what the other pilots did, mostly delivering and picking up planes. But she wanted to fly her own plane for him, and told her so. He pointed to one of his G.3s and said that if she could perform a loop, it was hers to fly for him. When she did, Caudron realized that having an attractive young woman flying his planes would be an excellent way to demonstrate how easy they were to fly. He told her to fly it over the English Channel. On the way there, she went to Brussels to spend the night celebrating with her friends. The next morning, newspapers reported that she was feared lost at sea. "I may have drowned last night," she quipped in response, "but not in water." The next day, 25 August 1920, she flew across the Channel, repeating Harriet Quimby's 1912 feat. Caudron then asked her to go to Argentina to do demonstration flights. After she arrived, Bolland began planning her Andes flight. The G3s that had been sent along to Argentina with her had been designed for use as military observation aircraft during World War I. Fragile and powered by Le Rhône 80 hp engines, they were not ideal for the trip, and she asked Caudron to send others. He said it was impossible. When she finally took off from Mendoza on 1 April 1921, she had 40 hours of flight time and neither maps nor any knowledge of the area. The night before, Bolland said later, a Brazilian woman claiming to be a worker of French descent who had never even seen an airplane before had visited her in her Buenos Aires hotel room. She thought the shy woman was trying to discourage her and told her she had as long as it would take to smoke a cigarette for the Brazilian woman to say what she had to say. The woman told her that on her flight, when she saw an oyster-shaped lake, to turn left towards a steep mountain face that resembled an overturned chair. "If you turn right, you're lost." Pilots had been attempting to cross the Andes since 1913, and the National Congress of Chile had offered a prize of 50,000 pesos for the first successful crossing of the range by a Chilean (if no foreigner had done so first)