Our flight from Atlanta made good time; we broke through the rain clouds a few minutes later, and heading north, the ground was soon visible. Our pilot was optimistic, too. "Our flying time will be a quick hour and 15 minutes," he reported. I considered the 10+ hour road trip the same journey would take and whistled softly.
As promised? The familiar skyline of DC was visible in less than 75 minutes. But we were too high to land, and as the airport receded, I understood that the wind was from the south and we would need to keep going and bank around to follow the river and land. we flew over our house, our school, Bill and Emily's house, and up past Great Falls and even beyond River Bend before we finally turned.
I had the same view of Arlington as our plane descended, now only 100 feet or so above the buildings in Roslyn, the Iwo Jima and Women in the Military memorials floating by, then the Eternal Flame, Arlington House, the Pentagon, Gravelly Point rushing toward us until that ever-present bump as we touched down. We were still early; so much so that the plane at our gate had not pushed back yet, and so we taxied slowly and then waited on that runway I have been taking off from and landing on all of my life.
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