Helicopter Ride, Part 2

I've just been over to my helicopter-hating brother's blog and had to laugh at his video response to my first Helicopter Ride post.

He writes: "The video below captures my true feelings about flying.Like the ride described by my sister, we are flying high in the mountains above a glacier. Yes, it is pretty. See the beautiful blue glacial lake? Now see the helicopter fly downwards at breakneck speed like a demonic roller coaster that has jumped the track. Now see the man clutching the seat as his heart tries to jump free from his chest. Now see the response he gives the cameraman for filming said event...."

You see, diversity is what makes family so great. Me, I grin my fool head off when I leave the ground. I love that perilous feeling when the helicopter banks and tilts on its side as you circle a mountain-top.

My brother...loves it, er, not so much. At least, that's what I got from his eloquent hand-gesture gesture to the camera-man on his helicopter ride.

Mind you, I don't have to get in a helicopter routinely as part of my job (he's a forest technologist, otherwise titled as the Grand High Treeplanter.) Our pilot (who owns a logging company) showed us some crazy mountainside spots where heli-loggers are sometimes required to land and honestly I wouldn't really want to try to disembark in any of those places.

No, I think I'll just sit back in my comfortable seat and enjoy the ride.

We flew over Mount Washington, somehow looking far less large without its crown of snow and with all its summer-bald ski-runs on display.

We flew over some of the logging areas near Cumberland---it all looks so neat and tidy from above. (It's much uglier from the ground, trust me.)

From our vantage point near Cumberland, we could see Kim's house!

Then we flew down-island towards Union Bay and flew over the log-sort there. We skimmed very low over the water, like a scene out of the old Beachcombers TV show titles, and some of the seals sunning themselves on the logs dived into the water as we approached.

Other seals just regarded us lazily, as if they couldn't care less that a strange metal bird was hovering beside them.

Now we were starting to head for home, back over my town and then....

....OVER MY HOUSE! :)

See where that red car is turning the corner? The house surrounded by shrubbery is mine. It looked so cute from up high. We circled around twice.

The coolest thing about seeing my house from a thousand feet up was that I couldn't spot a single weed in my yard....