The border of Wyoming and Colorado from the air, just outside of Cheyenne.
Same location one week later, when I only remembered the approximate location (after Nevada and before Cheyenne) and after studying Google Maps for about two minutes. The world is small – or Google Maps is great? Which is more frightening?
(Wyoming/Colorado, USA; December 2014)
Time to go home. Goodbye Fog City. Good morning Coastal range mountaintops. One day you will sink into the sea. But not today. Today you are beautiful.
(California, USA; December 2014)
At 36,000 feet the world is a true blue marble, curving over a hazy horizon. Great cities like Seattle disappear into the shade of the great Cascades range.
Floating over the world the Atlas we know from school comes to life. Somehow this river has found a way across the vast land to the Great Slave Lake.
And Kamloops really exists and looks like this, which is more than the dot in my Atlas. Look, there are quite many houses! But how terribly cold it must be down there?
(Canada; December 2014)
Never mind that fast track security was slow track. Never mind that breakfast never happened. Never mind Heathrow terminal 5 was a mess and many missed their connections. Because I made it. Because it was one of those crisp winter mornings when the sky is on icy fire.
(Above the Baltic Sea; December 2014)
Taxiing down as the sun comes up. Only cold mornings bring such crisp dawns. So often I forget that the sun always shines and it is the world that turns away at night.
(Helsinki airport, Finland; October 2014)
White puffy clouds sailed past in the brightness outside. The heavy week weighed on my eyelids and I close them for a moment. When I opened them the world had gone a deep shade of purple.
Suddenly there it was, the edge of the night. Literally. A dusk bending over the horizon, slowly unfurling a layer of dark from the East. And we flew right into it. As darkness enveloped our little aircraft I thought of the short film “Boat” by David Lynch.
“It was so bright. I couldn’t sleep. I thought, Nature contains many mysteries. There was a boat. And the man said, ‘we’re going to try to go fast enough to go into the night.'”
Our little plane did go fast enough, and the night came racing towards us, swallowing us whole.
(Boat by David Lynch: http://vimeo.com/70865173. Photo over Sweden; October 2014)
Hello Norway, you look good coated in gold. You make me forget we were just tossed around like a candy wrapper in the wind.
(Norway; August 2014)
Back “on the road” again.
(Above Sweden; August 2014)
One last stop in Oslo before the summer break calls for a little luxury. Some sushi by the fjord, and a fantastic breakfast at the Grand Hotel café. Quality time at the office, and a little more sushi at the airport.
And then I could see my home from the air through the haze of a hot day over the sea and summer had truly arrived.
(Oslo, Norway; and Helsinki, Finland; July 2014)
Somewhere down there in the thin green valleys between the snowy peaks cows go out to morning pasture, eagles circle over mountain meadows, people brew their first cup of coffee of the day, and another summer day begins in the Dolomites.
(Italy, June 2014)
This blue marble 