Today I’m flying to LA from Copenhagen. The flight is with Air France, and it goes thru Paris. The service is nice, the food is great. The only problem was that during the food service on the plane, they either just gave you the food, which was non-vegetarian, or offered two choices – both non-vegetarian. The food was great, but this lack of consideration was annoying. I would have chosen the vegetarian option twice. One cool thing about the plane was the electronic gadget built into the seat. It was the most advanced gadget I’ve seen as of yet. You could see movies, play games, watch the news, and see where you are on the map.
Speaking of the map, I was very surprised by the route the plane took from Paris to LA. I expected the plane to go west or even southwest, but instead it shot up almost directly north, over all of England, Scotland, and past Ireland. We passed some distance from the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and then even went over a considerable portion of southern Greenland! Then we went over Baffin Island, the Hudson Bay and Saskachewan / Manitoba. The part of the flight over the United States was barely over 2 hours, and it was almost directly south, passing over Salt Lake city and finally LA. I guess it must be the shortest way to go, even though it doesn’t look like it from a flat map.
Baffin Island was beautiful. Even though it’s only the end of summer, the whole island was covered with snow. Of course it is quite far north and away from Golfstream, but I was still surprised. Hudson Bay is huge – it took us about 3 hours to cross the whole thing. Salt Lake City was the first big city we flew over, and it looked gorgeous from the sky. The Salt Lake itself was actually white in parts from salt. I didn’t get a chance to see it when I was there in 2000. The Wassach mountains was also the only significant part of the Rockies we got close to. They looked great, even though there was no snow on them this time of year.
LA itself looks quite impressive from the sky, perhaps in a bad way. It is so sprawled, that even from a plane, you can see areas where all the way to the horizon it’s populated. There’s very little water, mostly just plains, mountains, and 80% is concrete – roads, malls, parking lots, and rooftops.
