We made it to California! My first two airline flights were pretty uneventful, really, and I’m quite happy about that. The only thing I’m remotely disappointed about the flights is that on the one from Chicago to Sacramento, my camera battery died before we got to the Rockies. My other battery was stowed in my carry-on but it seemed like a better plan not to disturb the two sleeping women between me and the aisle, one of them being my wife. I have some pretty ugly smart phone pictures from there on, but they aren’t nearly as nice as my camera takes.
I knew we lived in a big, wide country, but this becomes really obvious when you’re traveling at 500mph at around 7 miles above the surface. The skies were pretty overcast over Columbus and much of western Ohio, but things cleared up over Indiana and Illinois so we could actually see the ground.
Here are some pics from the first flight to Chicago:
And the second flight to Sacramento:
I haven’t pulled the pictures off of my phone yet of the rest of the trip, but mostly they are terrible. We saw some interesting cliff faces with visible layers in the rock formations. I believe I’ve identified a few of the lakes we flew over as well – Utah lake around Provo, UT with the salt flats to its west (and possibly the lower shore of Great Salt Lake, not totally sure on that), definitely Lake Tahoe (we flew directly over it – insanely deep-blue water) and other features. Hopefully we’ll fly back over this area on the way to Denver and I’ll have my camera batteries on my person.
After we got to Sacramento, I don’t have many pictures of our drive, which is unfortunate at best. There weren’t many (safe) places to pull off of I-5 going north toward Redding with a good enough vantage point to capture what I wanted to. Most of what we saw in the first 3/4 of the drive were miles and miles of wheat, corn and other crop fields as well as more miles and miles of tree orchards and groves of various types. Walnuts, olives, pecans and apples were just some of them we can remember. To say that a lot of food comes from this area is the understatement of the year. We drove off on a little road through a field toward a big walnut orchard (grove?, dunno) and I took a few pictures which made this panorama.
Up next: Pacific Ocean and Big, Tall Trees!