birds eye

A few shots from the plane on the way to Denver last Friday. I travel so often that even the flight pattern of taking off has become routine to me, so when this flight went a different direction, it unnerved me a little. We looped around and flew directly over LAX where we had taken off from, something I haven't done before. In the second pic you can see the terminals (3 on the left and 4 on the right) that make up the LAX complex. I love that all 4 terminals on the right still retain the bubble skylights (the white dot) in the pod at the end of the terminals. Almost all have been completely remodeled and expanded with strips of gates that lead to the pods, but originally, those pods existed out on the tarmac alone and you entered from underground. The other shot is looking back on Manhattan Beach - the oil fields in the lower right mark the border of El Segundo and Manhattan Beach close to my neighborhood.