Location Taken: Above Atlanta, Georgia
Time Taken: October 2012
The world looks so different from above. And yet, so familiar.
I’ve only taken a handful of flights in my life. There was one out to Denver when I was in middle school, a one-way flight that we drove back from. There was a pair of flights in 2008 out to Seattle as part of my sister’s search for a good grad school. And one this past October, to fly out to her graduation from said school, again driving back from it.
…I think that’s it. Four flights in my life. Seven if you count the separate airplanes I flew on, since it’s cheaper to do two-part flights with a layover than a direct flight if you’re heading all the way out to Seattle.
I tend to consider myself pretty well-traveled, and these days that’s almost synonymous with “on airplanes a lot”. But not me. I tend to do my traveling by car. I’ve driven from one side of the continent to the other three times now, and been all the way out to Newfoundland which is so far east it practically counts as a fourth time. Now I just need to drive to the westernmost part of Alaska and I’ll really have been from one side to the other.
Oh, and if train is a viable possibility, I’ll take that over cars and planes any day. I love train travel. I keep wishing that the US had far more train coverage than it does. And that I could easily pack my bike on more trains. That would make things so much better…
Still, I do like plane travel. It does take a lot less time than the other possibilities, and the actual flying part is nice. Well, at least it is if I have a window seat. Otherwise I’m disturbing the people I’m sitting next to by constantly craning my neck trying to see the ground.
It’s a touch surreal taking off from the local airport. I watch the world around me shift and shrink away, the familiar landscapes changing into the forms I see on Google Maps’ satellite view (which I’ve spent a very large amount of time looking at…). And then, even before the seatbelt sign is even considering turning off, the patch of land I spend my days on falls behind us, and new terrain opens up.
I suspect it’s my experience with satellite maps (and my general aptitude with geography) that makes it fairly easy for me to figure out what I’m looking at on the ground. It’s more difficult at night, mind you, but I love that the flights I’ve taken have had screens on the back of the seat in front of you that will display a map showing where the plane is. Makes it downright easy to figure out that that large blob of light I’m looking at is Des Moines, or Billings, or Spokane. Also really showed how much more of the land you can see if you’re that far up, since some of those cities were fifty miles from where the map on the screen was telling me the plane was.
Landing is also a bit surreal, though not as much for places I don’t know as well. Landing in Atlanta on the layover at sunset was nifty. I’ve never truly been to Atlanta, just its airport. So it was really nifty seeing just how far the city and its suburbs spread. I’m sure the area between Baltimore and Washington DC looks similarly populated, but that’s my home turf and I’m too busy looking for familiar landmarks in that area. And landing in Seattle at night was downright pretty. I got a really good view of downtown Seattle as the plane was landing. The Space Needle looked really odd when I was looking down at it at a 45 degree angle. The perspective just didn’t quite look right. And then, after that really quick eternity that is waiting for the plane to actually land, the boring parts of air travel reasserted themselves.
Airports are really boring, ya know. Not sure why, since there’s lots of shops and nifty art and the fascinating tech behind air travel to think about. Maybe it’s just that most of the people there are just sitting around waiting and being bored, and all that accumulated emotion just kinda bleeds over even to people like me who aren’t at all easily bored. And there’s all the standard complaints of air travel too, though since you’ve heard them, I’m not bothering to repeat them here. Security always worries me, though, since there was one time I missed a flight because we spent about twenty minutes too long in the security line (pro tip: never join a security line that you can’t see the end of, even if just because it turns around the corner right before the end. It will be twice as long as the other lines and you won’t realize it until far too late.)
