The fringes of the hurricane from Florida spun across the mid-south last Monday, drenching us at evening rush hour. About 5 minutes after I got home and fired up the box to check e-mail, a near-by transformer went sizzle-pop and the prospects of an unpowered evening flashed across my brain as everything went quiet and dark.
Adapted to the loss with a 90-second walk across the street to my son's home where we had dinner and watched about half of the Battlestar Galactica pilot on DVD. By then power was restored to the home front and FS life resumed.
With fingers crossed, I engaged Tile Proxy and began a flight at Taos, NM (KSKX). I didn't visit the airport when we vacationed out there a couple of years ago, but there was some awesome scenery along the way and I wondered how well it would look with photo scenery. Quite nice, in fact.
The Rio Grande flows past Taos having dug a signifcant canyon through the plain along there and carved (or found) its way through the hills just to the south. Impressive place to drive through; it's known as the Grand Canyon of the Rio Grande. Somehow, I never thought of this famous river beyond the context of "the border with Mexico"; never thought about where it came from. It was a bit of a surprise to see it in a canyon context.
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Reporting on places that others might also be interested in seeing from the virtual skies of Flight Simulator will be one of the more frequent offerings in my commentary. I spend most of my FS time as an aerial tourist, VFR-ing my way back and forth across the country.
I think what got me started was the release of USA Roads for FS9. This allowed one to do pilotage with nothing more than good road maps and I started exploring right then and have never looked back. One day I realized that some of the roads I was following were highlighted on the maps...duh! the publishers had marked scenic routes already and scenic almost always involved TERRAIN: mountains, hills, canyons - something more to see than wide vistas of "FLAT". But not all terrain is accessible to cars and one way to find some of those areas is noticing where the contour lines bunch together on a contour map. I found them online first using the NASA World Wind viewer and Google Maps also has a terrain view mode. This comes in especially handy while using the GMap utility linked to FSX. I still use the FSMMovingMap a lot because it doesn't depend on continual internet connectivity. Though the maps are getting 'dated' they're good enough for most purposes and can be edited with notes etc. I'm not quite up to 'adding user content' to Google Earth yet to document my travels, but that day will come.
More from the Taos area another time.
Loyd
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