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Connecticut coastline near NYC

I traveled to Europe for a week but with clouds everywhere and a lot of night flying I had no aerial photos to show for the trip. If I hadn’t made the mistake of connecting through New York’s JFK, I wouldn’t have a blog entry for this trip.

It’s never good when you are traveling toward New York City and thanks to horribly overcast conditions end up in Boston to get more fuel. By the time I reached New York, my connection was long gone. Unlike Lufthansa two months earlier, America Airlines rebooked me on a morning flight then shrugged their shoulders, blamed the weather and left me to fend for myself at 10pm. Thank you America Airlines for nothing.

The next day, I got a couple of nice photos out the window on take-off and then had to suffer through half a continent of cloud coverage before the dry southeast offered up some stunning views.

Jamaica Bay with New York, New York in the distance
Google Maps Wikipedia
Taking off from JFK, I could see New York City in the distance. In the foreground, you can see Crossbay Blvd on the left and the subway’s A line on the right crossing over the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge on their way to the Rockaway Peninsula part of the New York City borough of Queens.

Zion National Park and Kolob Canyons, Utah
Google Maps Wikipedia
The red Navajo sandstone of Zion National Park really stood out against the southwest’s winter landscape. The canyon was discovered by Mormon’s in 1858 (although Native Americas had lived in the area for 8,000 years). The photo shows the northern part of the park called the Kolob Canyons section. It is home to the Kolob Arch, the second largest natural bridge in the world.

Pine Valley Mountain Wilderness, Utah
Google Maps Wikipedia
I loved the contrast between the red Navajo sandstone and the white Pine Valley Mountains in this southwestern corner of Utah. The Pine Valley Mountain Wilderness can be found in the Dixie National Forest. At the bottom of the photo, Highway 15 passes through the small town of Leeds heading southwest toward Las Vegas and eventually San Diego.

Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada
Google Maps Wikipedia
The Muddy River can be seen on the right of the photo flowing through the Moapa Valley and into the northern reaches of Lake Mead. To the left is the Valley of Fire State Park — a definite finalist for “state park with the coolest name.” According to Wikipedia, the park gets its name from the red sandstone formations which appear to be on fire when reflecting the sun’s rays. Cool film factoid — the park doubled as the martian landscape for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1990 Total Recall.

Zzyzx, California
Google Maps Wikipedia
I’ve seen the sign for Zzyzx — pronounced ‘zy-zicks’ (rhymes with ‘high hicks’) — when driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on Highway 15. Now part of California State University’s Desert Studies Center, this settlement in the Mojave Desert was originally named Camp Soda and Soda Springs. In 1944, the name was changed to Zzyzx, a made-up name chosen so it would be the ‘last word in the English language.” Baker, California can be seen in the top right of the photo.

South Los Angeles, California
Google Maps Wikipedia
View looking toward downtown Los Angeles as we’re landing at LAX. You can see the 110 Highway on the left side of the picture above. You can also see the football field of the John C. Fremont High School in South Los Angeles. For more on the area, you can check out the South Los Angeles Report.

Another European trip. Five countries in five days which is a little more exciting in the winter. Not the good exciting. More of a Russian roulette with weather delays serving as the bullets. SFO to Lyon, France to Munich, Germany to Budapest, Hungary to Florence, Italy. My luck ran out on the way to Dusseldorf when I got stuck in Frankfurt due to weather. Got to love Lufthansa though. It was a weather delay, but they put everyone up in hotels, paid for my taxi and gave me a food voucher. U.S.-based airlines seem to wash their hands over ‘acts of God’ that cause travel delays. I connected through Zurich on a Swiss Air flight home to SFO.

Zurich, Switzerland
Wikipedia Google Maps
I’ve passed through Zurich on vacation before. It seems like a nice city, but perhaps a bit too… ‘precise?’ It lacks some of the gritty style you find in Paris or the friendly atmosphere of a Munich. To be fair I haven’t given it much of a chance. I’m sure it would be a lot more fun to travel with someone who knows their way around. Of course, it’s a financial center and the capital of Switzerland, so maybe it’s OK that it’s not a ‘fun’ destination. As we took off from the aiport, I was facing into the sun. Not the best of photos, but a nice view of Lake Zurich. Makes me wonder which was named first, the city or the lake.

North of 53, Manitoba
Wikipedia Google Maps
The skies over the Atlantic Ocean were cloudy but as we passed over the northern reaches of Canada, the sky cleared and I snapped a few photos out of the window. I thought it would be easy to find the locations on Google Earth, but it was nearly impossible! There are a lot of frozen lakes in Northern Canada. I had to cheat and found a web site, www.flightaware.com, that will show your actual flight path of any flight you’ve taken in the last couple of months (after a free registration). Turns out I was over northern Manitoba when I took the above picture. The official Manitoba website divides the Canadian province into eight main regions, the largest — and well over half their realestate! — is lumped into what they call North of 53. If you’d care to visit, “lumbering polar bears, great beluga whales and massive trophy fish await your arrival.”

Wekusko, Manitoba
Google Maps
Still in Manitoba, but a little closer to civilization. Tawow Lodge, only about 30km northwest of this site, offers cold weather adventures including ice fishing or cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and snowmobiling.” I think I’d wait for summer. The photo above is lloking south. Lake Hargrave is the large lake and the road below it, Route 39, leads north to Wekusko Lake — apparently a really good place for hunting and fishing according to Wekusko Falls Lodge.

San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge
Wikipedia Google Maps
We had great views of San Francisco as we were landing. You know its a great view when the flight attendant leans over to look out your window. The Golden Gate Bridge appears to be single-handedly holding back the fog from the Pacific Ocean to protect the city. Alcatraz can be seen just north of the bridge. There are three natural harbors along California’s coast — San Diego, Monterrey and San Francisco. The Spanish found the first two in the 1500s. It took over 200 years more for Spanish explorers to find San Francisco Bay (OK, they weren’t trying that hard after they found a route passed the Philippines to the East Indies). The narrow entrance and the fog are credited for sheltering the bay from sight for so many years.

Candlestick Park, San Francisco
Wikipedia Google Maps
Candlestick Park — home of the San Francisco 49ers football team (1971 to present) and former home of the San Francisco Giants baseball team (1960 to 2000) until they moved closer to downtown San Francisco. The city of Oakland can be seen in the distance across San Francisco Bay. San Jose/Santa Clara to the south are hoping to lure the 49ers to the South Bay with promises of a new stadium. The 49ers have won five superbowls during their Candlestick years.

Fields Near Pheonix

I was flying back east for work at the end of November and connected through Pheonix (the old Northwest hub) on USAirways. I hadn’t remembered that it was Northwest Airlines that had bought out USAirways. A flight attendant told me that they kept the USAirways name because it already had some recognition in Europe. Anyway, I had so many interesting shots out the window on this trip — interesting to me at least — that I had a hard time narrowing down which ones to include.

There is something about taking pictures of the dry Southwest that makes for really pretty pictures, especially the Midland picture below. By the time I connected through Pheonix heading east to Pittsburgh, it was too dark to for photos.

San Luis Reservoir, CA
Wikipedia Google Maps
We pass San Luis Reservoir when we drive from the Bay Area to the in-laws in Merced, CA.

Avenal, CA
Wikipedia Google Maps
Here’s an interesting statistic — almost half of the 15,000 or so residents of Avenal are actually inmates of the Avenal State Prison, a low-medium security institution. You can see the town in the center of the picture and the prison to the right and across the road. Avenal was named by the Spanish — ‘Avena’ means oats or oatfield in Spanish. The discovery of oil in the 1920s turned Avenal into a boom town.

Midland, CA
Wikipedia Google Maps
To be honest, Midland, CA is just on or perhaps just off the right side midway up the image, but it was the only town on the map in this part of the state. Not much of a town though. It is a ghost town. In the early 1900s, a man named Floyd Brown discovered gypsum deposits in the area. Gypsum is soft mineral primarily used to make drywall. Midland would become a company town of the U.S. Gypsum Co. (now a division of USG) and once had 1,000 inhabitants. The mining stopped in the 1960s.

Colorado River Separating California and Arizona
Wikipedia Google Maps
The poor Colorado River. It starts strong in California, but by the time it passes through California and Arizona much of its water is diverted to irrigate farm lands. So much so that there are days when the river runs dry before its waters reach the Gulf of California. In this image, the river divides California on the left and Arizona on the right just north of Blythe, CA.

Quartzsite, AZ
Wikipedia Google Maps
I had no idea that there was a grand experiment in the U.S. Army to train and use camels for transportation during desert wars. In 1856, camels were shipped to the US and the U.S. Camel Corp were formed. Camels were used in Texas and west to California. They were indeed better than horses in transporting people and material through dry, arid regions. At least one report blames the camels for spooking horses and mules thus ending the experiment. Hi Jolly, a citizen of the Ottoman Empire brought over by the US Army as a lead camel driver, is buried in Quartzsite, AZ. Today, the town of over 3,000 on Interstate 10 is popular with RV enthusiasts.

Pheonix Speedway
Wikipedia Google Maps
It is easy to spot the Pheonix International Raceway southwest of downtown Pheonix in the image above. The raceway opened in 1964 and includes a one mile oval and a meandering 2.5 mile road course (now cut down to 1.5 miles).