In today's video, some great views on a flight I took recently out of Southeastern Washington.
Starting with a nice look at the bridges over the Columbia River in the Tri Cities...
And the wind turbines in the hills along the river.
A second crossing of the Columbia along the Oregon/Washington state line...
And some dormant volcanos in Oregon.
But the best views were in the San Francisco Bay area...
With an amazing view of the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge to Oakland...
And Silicon Valley at the south end of the bay.
This was a flight on a little CRJ-200 aircraft...
A tiny little regional jet, but the views on this flight were fantastic!
We were flying out of the Tri Cities airport in Pasco, Washington...
And our final destination would be Los Angeles...
Where we would be boarding one of our favorite cruise ships for a 7-day cruise to Mexico.
There will be several videos about that cruise in the coming weeks.
The focus of today's video is just the amazing views I had on the flight down from Washington to California.
Flying south out of Pasco is fun. You cross the Columbia River here in the Tri Cities.
You get a nice view of the river, and several beautiful bridges that are iconic to the Tri Cities...
There's the Blue Bridge, seen here in a video I shot with my drone last summer...
And the even more-impressive Cable Bridge, and again this is a shot from my drone.
I'm a licensed commercial drone pilot...
So, throwing in a good drone shot here and there...
That's how I roll.
But back to the view from the airplane...
There's the Columbia River running through the Tri Cities...
With the Blue Bridge in the foreground...
And the Cable Bridge in the background.
The city of Pasco on the left side of the river. That's my hometown.
And the city of Kennewick on the right.
A few minutes later, we had a real nice view of the wind turbines up in the hills just south of the Tri Cities.
Between the wind turbines in the hills...
The hydro facilities at all the dams along the river...
And the nuclear plant just north of Richland...
Electrical generation in Washington just does not pollute the skies the way it does in states that rely more on natural gas or coal for power generation.
A little further south, at the southern border of Washington...
We cross the Columbia River a second time and head in to the state of Oregon.
You can see the circles where farmers are able to use the river water from the Columbia...
To turn what used to be very dry unproductive land... in to extremely productive farm land.
A little further south in Oregon, we started to see a little snow on the hillsides of the Blue Mountain range.
And further south in Oregon the land is very volcanic.
In this shot right here, I can see at least two dormant volcanoes in the foreground...
And I think there's quite a few more off in the distance.
But the real highlight of this flight, as far as the views go...
Happened once we got down in to the San Francisco Bay area.
I think that's the Petaluma area in the lower part of this shot...
And in the distance it's San Pablo Bay.
I'm going to speed this up for a minute here...
Now you can see the bridge that links San Rafael with Richmond.
And on the right side of the screen...
Our very first glimpses of San Francisco and that whole beautiful area of San Francisco Bay.
Speeding things up again for a minute...
Our plane makes a little turn to the south...
And this lines us up for a pretty nice look at the North Bay Area.
If you know what you're looking for, you can spot Sausalito and Tiburon...
And over on the other side of the bay that whole area stretching from Oakland, in to Berkeley, and up to Richmond.
I'll speed it up again to get us to this point...
To me, this is about as good as it gets!
That's the money shot right there: The Golden Gate.
And the city of San Francisco.
The Presidio.
On the lower left side: The Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
You've got a real nice view of the Bay Bridge leading to Oakland.
Way off in the distance there, I see Mt Diablo.
In the bay, there's Treasure Island, where they had the world's fair...
Yerba Buena Island in the middle of the Bay Bridge...
I see Angel Island...
If you know what you're looking for, you can see Alcatraz...
As we advance a little further you can see Golden Gate Park...
Twin Peaks... and the Sutro Tower.
We make another little turn and now we're looking to the northeast.
There's a great view of the city of San Francisco...
The Bay Bridge leading over to Oakland...
You can see Alameda...
Mt Diablo in the distance on the far right of the screen...
And a little bit of one aspect of the global supply chain problem...
Ships anchored in the bay, waiting for their turn to load or unload.
Advancing a little further through the video...
On the other side of the bay, you can see the Oakland International Airport...
And then as we fly south to get in to the traffic pattern to land at SFO...
We've got a look at all the cities on the east side of the Bay...
Oakland, San Leandro, San Lorenzo...
Down in to Union City and Fremont.
All this way, we've had the sun behind us...
Giving us great lighting for this view of everything to the east.
But now the airplane has to do a 180 to line us up with the runway at SFO...
And that means that shooting out my window on the left side of the plane, I'm shooting in to the sun...
So that's the end of the gorgeous views.
This was our first of two flights for today.
The second flight took us to Los Angeles, but that was after dark, so there were no gorgeous views.
As I mentioned earlier, we were on our way to LA to board one of our favorite cruise ships, Carnival Panorama...
For a seven-day cruise down to Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, and Puerto Vallarta.
Where among other things, I got some crazy great shots during a whale-watching excursion.
There will be several videos in the coming weeks about all the aspects of the fun we had during our February vacation.
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I'm Jim Zim. Thanks for watching!