SAN --> JFK

Hasta la vista, CDMX!

SAN --> LAX --> PVG

On my way back to China - first time in five years! VPN willing, I'll keep you posted on new discoveries and rediscoveries.

TPSRE ablaze

There was a brush fire today in the Torrey Pines SNR Extension! 

The area's indispensable photographer Herb Knufken posted a photo as it was just starting - taken from across the lagoon, in Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve itself. After many hours, the work of 150 firefighters, many water-dumping aircraft and some evacuations, 23 acres were burned, including trails we hiked just half a year ago. 

Following the fire in real time, not from across the lagoon but from across the continent, brought back scarred memories of the Witch Fire in October 2007, a much bigger conflagration which seemed, until the fierce winds changed direction, likely to destroy the whole town in which I grew up. And more recent memories, too, like the path through a kind of tree-tunnel which we walked just last December...

Over the mountains to the sea

Lateral

Photographer Paul Seibert took this amazing picture - perhaps last fall? There's so much go take delight in here, notably the shadow of the skyline stretching across the river in the middle of the picture. We're in it too, at about 3:30, to the upper right of Morningside Park, the smaller Manhattan park stretched out here...

Overview

Our flight to San Diego took an unusual southerly route today, but it offered the familiar story of human interventions in towns and fields, lines and grids and circles, progessively succumbing to the contours of the land.

(The plumes of smoke from distant fires were new.) It did occur to me, though, as I gasped with slow rapture at majestic water patterns etched in even the flattest-seeming of dry terrain, that it's a little incongruous that a child of landscapes like these should be thinking new thoughts the gift of trees. ... Or not!

Meanders

Flew to California today, my heart pulled as it has been since I was a teenager by the stark splendors of the western landscape unspooling in splendor below. The tug comes from having lived and moved on that land - a memory in the muscles of one's feet and legs - and beneath its storytelling sky, syncopated over many years with these aerial visions of land patterns you can't see as they shape your way.

Vistas

Amazing view down the Hudson from my flight out of La Guardia today. You can see almost the whole 13.4 miles of Manhattan, the harbor, the Atlantic in the distance... and waves somehow translated all the way up opposite Bloomer Beach! And destination Denver was snow dusted.

Lettering

Yesterday's flight took a more southerly route than customary, for a good while hugging the Mexico-US border. Somewhere near there, as we were leaving Arizona, I noticed sand dunes thet seemed to be giant letters in an unknown alphabet. I'd love to know more!

Travel in omicron times

We were among the lucky ones. Our flight wasn't one of those winnowed by jetBlue in anticipation of covid-related staff shortages, even though it was only half full! And it wasn't among the 2300 flights apparently cancelled because of last night's winter storm in the Northeast (we were delayed a little). But omicron reality awaited us at JFK, where we waited 45 minutes for a gate and another 45 minutes at the gate for someone to get the jet bridge to work - and then another hour for baggage. Finally home at midnight!

Manhattan squat

JetBlue 89 hung left instead of right on its loop out of JFK today...

Back on the grid

Home sweet home

Jet Blue

Looking for all the world like the landscape in the background of a Netherlandish Madonna, an early morning aerial view of the winding Hudson River and the shining city where it meets the sea.

New York --> Minneapolis --> San Diego

Longest day

Views from airplane windows of our points of departure - Mount Macedon, VIC - and arrival - Del Mar, CA. The first picture was taken at about 9:45am of an Australian winter, the second ostensibly an hour later in Californian summer, diagonally across the vast Pacific!

Au revoir, San Diego!

Out the window of the JetBlue flight back to New York, we were afforded a last view of places of delight: Del Mar, at upper left of the photo on the right, with the glorious Pacific, and Borrego Springs, at upper right of the photo below, the start of the desert Southwest. You can find snow in both pictures, too!

Coast to coast

Spent a little over five hours today flying across the distance we'll be driving over ten days soon. Weather covered most of the first hour, and also led the pilot to divert our route a little, but the views then were spectacular... Imagining ourselves on a road in the landscapes down below (though our route will be bit farther north) was trippy!

Now imagine going the other direction, desert to mountain to plain...

Across the pond

I'm back! My budget (if still not inexpensive) trip took me over JFK to CDG and back Orly to Newark, both in surprisingly small planes. The more interesting surprise was that we flew over the Channel Islands and then snowy Newfoundland and Nova Scotia on the way, before hitting weather. I'd forgotten that Europe is so, well - it's not close exactly, and it isn't cheap anymore, but it is convenient. Back when some combination of my parents, my sister and I lived there I was building carbon karma over the North Atlantic several times a year... The much larger Pacific (and the whole of it, not just the northern part) is our family pond now, and Asia claims me in ways Europe no longer does, personally or professionally. After a quite lovely week in France that seems more bittersweet than it has for a while. Je reviendrai un jour!

The twain

Follow my gaze, about midway through today's thirteen and a half hour direct flight from Shanghai Pudong to New York John F. Kennedy. (I was sitting on the right side of the plane, looking southward.) I'd noticed that we were keeping company with the moon - full, or nearly full - only slowly leaving it behind as we flew along the coastline of Alaska. Above is my last glimpse of it, setting behind us. I didn't watch it fade from view because an unfurling glacier below caught my eye. And then, to the southeast, where our plane was headed, I saw the first light of a new day dancing on the peaks and edges of massive snow-covered mountains wading like ancient sea monsters in an ocean of cloud! (The largest may be Mount Logan.) My cellphone camera barely does them justice. But you get the idea. First light - gold, then peach, then cream, then white - on only the very highest points of mountains, sometimes no more than the thin line of a ridge, and all the more dramatic as the mountains' bodies below were dark green: it's summer!
For one going from steamy Shanghai to muggy New York Alaska's snow caps, however summery, are neither here nor there. But for one stretching out one July 1st - or perhaps grafting two - as he returned across the International Date Line to the Western Hemisphere after nearly a year away, it felt like a welcome home.