I'm always surprised when this actually works. The plane doesn't seem to be rolling down the runway all that fast, when suddenly the nose rises and the plane pops up into the air.

SFO already looks small.

We usually think of an airport as the terminal building. From the air we can see that an airport is mostly concrete and asphault, with a small building on the grounds. It's mostly open space; we probably won't see many endangered species reintroduced into this open space any time soon though. In fact, SFO would like to fill another square mile of San Francisco Bay, to create more of this barren landscape.

Here's the new BART extension to SFO. Construction took longer than expected because the green marshlands it crosses actually are filled with endangered species. After all, where else were they supposed to go around here?!

As the plane climbs higher, Crystal Springs Reservoir reveals the location of the San Andreas Fault.

Yes, we are a bold people. We store our drinking water in an earthquake fault in the mountains above our homes.

Just over the Santa Cruz Mountains, the Pacific licks the toes of the U.S. near the town of Pacifica.

This section of Highway 1 is called Devil's Slide, because the highway keeps falling into the ocean here.

What a cute little airport! Spanning the bay in the background is the San Mateo Bridge.

In the center is Oracle Corporation, "the world's largest enterprise software company." Funny, it doesn't look so big from where I'm sitting.

The Dumbarton Bridge looks like a thread across the South Bay.

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