Last Week: From the Air

I'm finally getting around to blogging about my trip to St. Louis last week, and rather than do a gigantic post I'm going to break it into pieces. The first: my pictures from takeoff. I love taking off from LAX in clear weather because most of the time we take off over the ocean and take a left down the coast, which means we fly over our house. Let me walk you through what I mean. Above is the picture shortly after we turned left after takeoff. That fat peninsula is Palos Verdes.

Now we're heading down the coast and what you see are the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Together they are the ninth largest container port complex in the world. About a third of what comes into the country (and about three-fourths of what comes in through the west coast) comes in through these two ports. (Not counting what Santa brings in!)

Now the Port of Los Angeles is behind us and what's in this picture is just the Port of Long Beach.  The long waterfront to the right of the port is the Long Beach coastline.

And this is where we live! See the pier on the middle of the coastline in the picture? That's the Belmont Pier. See the island in the water? That's just off the coast from our house. So if you draw a line from the island to the coast, and go inland one block, that's where we live!