Trip to Seattle - Part 1

We all made it back from our trip to Seattle safe and sound. I plan to post pictures from the trip over several entries. I saw lots of cool, new-to-me stuff on the way there. We left Austin on Wednesday, September 21 in the early afternoon and saw the first volcano of the trip (Pilot Knob - dating back to the Cretaceous) not far to the south of the airport behind the planes in the first picture. The guard base there has C-130s like Peoria, only these have big fluorescent numbers on their tails. Our GPS was a challenge to operate on the plane, but when it did pick up satellites it was able to point out where we were and note our speed. What I really wish is that I could operate Google Earth while in the air to figure out what I am seeing, rather than trying to remember and look up later. We passed over El Paso very close to the Mexican border (note the stripe of green along the Rio Grande - Mexico is on the right, US on the left) on the way to our layover in Phoenix, AZ. On the way to Seattle we flew over the Grand Canyon - it's impressive even from the air. We flew north of Mt. Rainier (we were on the wrong side of the plane, but saw fantastic lenticular clouds over her when we landed). We saw Glacier Peak and Mt. Baker in the distance (not far from the Canadian border), and got a pretty good view of the northern Seattle area, which is special to us because that was our old stomping grounds on my previous sabbatical in 2004-05 and in the summer of 2007, and of course my brother and his family live there as well. Seattle was high on our list for sabbatical options this time, too, but things did not pan out. It was a bit emotionally tumultuous to come back for this visit.