You're Going Where?

What do you mean, you're flying south? Who is going to feed us? We need peanut butter! We need nuts! I hope you have made arrangements! Much against the Gray Jay's protest, we are heading to Seattle for a visit. As this is posted, we are in the air and on our way. We'll be gone for 10 days, but I plan to post some photos from the Pacific Northwest. I will probably not have a lot of time for blog reading, but I'll catch up when we get home. Now I only hope that we won't see snow while we're there!

Views From the Air

We spent the day yesterday traveling and were in the air about eight hours and about that many more hours in the airports at Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Anchorage. We left Pittsburgh at about 1:30 Eastern time in the afternoon and arrived home at midnight Alaska time, which would be 4:00 a.m. Eastern time. The flight from Pittsburgh to Chicago was mostly cloudy, but as we approached Chicago the clouds opened up a bit. The view of Chicago and Lake Michigan was beautiful.

I loved the shadows of the clouds on the lake.

We left Chicago a bit before 7:00 p.m. and the sun was just setting. As we reached altitude and flew northwest, I had a gorgeous view of the sunset all along the horizon for as far as I could see.

As we were flying towards the west, the sunset was prolonged for over an hour. It was a very different view of the sunset than you usually see and I sat and watched until finally the sun outran the plane and all that was visible was darkness and the lights from towns below. As we flew further north the lights became fewer and fewer as we flew over the Yukon and Alaska.

Today we were home and here the fall colors have all made their way to the ground. The trees are bare and there has been a hard frost, turning the flowers brown. Today was sunny and about 50 degrees, so Marty mowed the lawn one last time, collecting the leaves and bagging them up. I cleaned out all my flower boxes and tomorrow I will tackle the flower bed in the back.

We had a great time on our trip but it's good to be home! Your own bed feels really good after you've been sleeping in hotels for a while.

Ocean View from Hearst Castle

This photo was taken on the same trip in 2002 at Hearst Castle in California. It is still one of my favorite shots.

Photos From Washington and Oregon

Over the next week or so I'll be sorting through the hundreds of photos I took on our trip and posting more of our adventures. They won't be in any particular order, just whatever I happen to get together. I've just posted some from last Monday when we were in Tacoma. The Ice Park here in Fairbanks is open and I hope to get there in the next few days, so I'll have some shots from there also.