Goin' South...

This week I'm in Palm Desert with Dad while Larry is on Vacation. We flew right over San Francisco on the way down from Oregon... and this was what I saw out my window! It was absolutely clear and there were lots of boats in the bay. So pretty! I'm lucky to have seen this as SF usually has some fog or marine haze to obsure the view.

I was on the wrong side of the plane to see Sonoma County very clearly. Actually That's wrong. I could see Santa Rosa and Petaluma, but our path was to the East of the Llano and I didn't get to see our old house! Too bad, that would have been pretty cool.







On the second flight, the one from San Francisco to Palm Springs, our flight path took us over LA and apparently direcly over the "Station Fire" that is burning down there. The pilot had to alter our course to go around the big Cumulo Nimbus that was created by the heat of the fire. The air was so thick with smoke that we couldn't see the LA Metro area at all. This shot was out the window at cruising altitude (I didn't get how high we were, but somewhere around 25-30 thousand feet, I'm guessing) and the cloud extends higher than we were! I had hoped that the wildfire smoke would be stopped at the mountains. Those high mountains are what makes the Palm Springs area a desert; the clouds dump all their moisture on the West side and the Imperial Valley gets little of the rain. No such luck, the Palm Springs area is pretty smoky, too.