a good road trip begins with a long flight

I've made mention a couple times of getting ready for a big road trip.  Well I just started it!  I took a month off of work to travel with my girlfriend Emily through Canada and into Montana.  She is a graduate student at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.  She was able to take a semester off from classes to work on her thesis, so she can travel with me and also live in CNY for the fall.  Yesterday I flew from Rochester to Georgia to Minnesota to Winnipeg, finally making it into her arms and marking the first part of our journey.

The flight from Rochester left at 6am.  The sun hadn't risen yet on the ground, but as we got above the clouds a yellow glow lit the eastern sky.  From the airplane's window I could see no land.  Instead there was a world of clouds.  It was an entire landscape of rolling blue clouds for as far as I could see.  And on the horizon there appeared to be far off mountains made of clouds.  I spend at least a half hour staring out the window, watching with wonder, and feeling like it was a spiritual or even magical scene.  As the sun rose its warm light touched the tops of the tallest clouds.  It was like a blue sea with dashes of red.  And as the sun rose higher the blue clouds began to change to white.  When the seat-buckle light went off I get my camera out and was able to take some photos.  It was still beautiful, but by then the magical scene had changed.  I will forever wish I had been able to photograph that special ethereal world.

So where are Emily and I going?  After a couple nights in Winnipeg, we are heading west.  It will be like this: Winnipeg -> Regina -> Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan -> Glacier National Park in Montana -> back to Winnipeg -> Chicago -> Rochester, NY.  After I drop Emily off in Rochester I will head back to Syracuse and on to Boston to photograph the wedding of some friends of mine.  After that it is back to the real world.

I will try to make posts on here when I can to share with you some of the adventures we have.  Please follow along and hopefully we will be able to show you some of the beauty that we find in prairie and the mountains.