Across the Atlantic

When you look at the Earth from the bird's view, everything looks unfamiliar and strange. You peer at the objects you cannot recognize and try to understand what you see. It's like resolving a huge jigsaw puzzle, where the pieces are not only scattered around but also changing every minute...

It was a gloomy cold September morning, when we boarded the plane, took off and started to look from the porthole trying to recognize outlines and shapes... It was the beginning of the long journey from there to here ;)

 

From the beginning it wasn't much to see - the thick layer of clouds made everything white, puffy and just the same. But after about four hours the clouds moved away and we started working on the puzzle. We identified this landscape as the mountains somewhere in Greenland. Mountains, lakes and fjords...

 

Oh, also the glaciers!

Just look at this glacier - it looks like a river, the ice is fluid and if you watch it long enough you can see how it's moving... slowly, like a foot per month, but moving, and you can believe you can see it!

Actually it was just a short period of time when we were able to see something. Later the clouds took over and once again we felt like we were only small group of people in miles and miles of open space...

So it was a real pleasure to meet some fellow travelers, moving so close but with great speed... Yes, we shared the path for only a few minutes, but every time it was a special feeling, like meeting a friend somewhere in the middle of nowhere...

After a couple of hours of unending clouds we enjoyed seeing Canada with its endless woods and lakes.

 

It took a few more hours to reach the USA and see something different. Some new world we never had seen before and everything looked just different...

A few more minutes and the plane made a sharp turn descending really fast. We were above New York. NY, the city we heard so much about so we were peering through the portholes and trying to figure out what we saw under the wings. Hopeless... nothing looked anyhow familiar. The only thing we were able to make out of what we saw, they call NY a Big Apple, it doesn't look like an apple ;)

Our plane made a few more turns, slided just above the roofs and finally landed at the JFK airport. After a half a day in the air we reached our destination... We were tired, jetlagged, and really glad we didn't need to do any more travel before the next day. But even though we moved to the other side of the globe and were tired to death, it was beyond our strength to stay put, so we left the hotel and walked about an hour exploring the streets around the place we were staying overnight...

 

Next morning we drove to La Guardia airport and boarded another plane. This one should bring us to Atlanta where one more was waiting. It was so cool to look through the window and see one of the New York bridges just outside the runway ;)

But it still was New York after all. And New York means traffic everywhere, right? In NY you can find yourself in a jam even in the airport, waiting for your plane to take off :)

But finally the plane sped up, passed by Manhattan's skyscrapers and went airborne... We were on our way from the coast to our final destination, somewhere in the middle of the country...

We looked at the Brooklyn bridge (at least we believed it was the Brooklyn bridge)...

...enjoyed a glance of Manhattan ...

...and gilded above the clouds...

...made a circle above La Guardia where more plains were waiting for their time to fry...

 

...and continued above the thick clouds.

As I mentioned before we were tired and, actually, don't really remember our transfer in Atlanta. We were traveling for more than 24 hours and everything blurred out. It took a few more hours before our plane started to descend and finally landed in Denver.

We got our luggage, stepped out of the airport and turned around. About 30 hours ago we left a well known landscape and now we were facing something  extraordinary - Denver International Airport looked fanciful and new for us. We traveled close to 6,000 miles, crossed the Atlantic ocean and finally were looking to start a new life...

Pictures were taken on September 09-10, 2008.