Eureka!
The trip from California to Chicago provided some nice views of the Rocky Mountains. I don’t usually get good landscape pictures from the cockpit but since we had hours to go I thought I’d break out the camera and try again anyways. Perhaps it was because I was stuck on a early morning trip and the sun was still low (why does anyone get up at 4am to fly anywhere?) or because we were over Nevada with clear, dry air but the pictures came out better than I expected.
Toby looked at the photo and asked if this was ‘flyover land’. He said he had heard of it but hadn’t seen it before. I told him that was a bit of a derogatory term and that there must be some nice people and places down there. He said, ‘I don’t see anyone or anything. It could be Mordor for all I can tell except I don’t see that big volcano.’ I checked Google Maps to figure out what the area was and discovered the town of Eureka, NV is in the valley to the upper left of the photo. Toby then asked Alexa how many people lived in Eureka and after she told us it had a population of 480, he looked at me like he had proven his point.
Toby then wondered what was wrong with my camera that it made the horizon bend like that. I told him the camera was fine but that we were so high up you could just start to see some curvature of the earth. He wanted to know how he was supposed to believe that something that is flat could be curved but rather than start back up on that again, I decided to mollify him and say that scientists are now pretty confident that the universe is flat. That didn’t help - he said, ‘It’s impossible for something that goes in all directions to be “flat”’, He continued by saying, ‘You live in some bizzaro world where flat things are round and infinite things are flat - hmmmf! And, oh by the way, shouldn’t you have been flying the plane or something?’ Sometimes I wish he couldn’t talk.
A7riv, SEL1635GM, f14, 1/125sec, iso160
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